The start of the year is an excellent time to try something new in your business promotion pursuit and adjust your marketing strategy.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, businesses are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to engage with customers and build their brands online.

With its customer-focused approach and emphasis on creating valuable content, Inbound marketing has emerged as a powerful strategy for businesses of all sizes and industries.

As digital marketing professionals, we know (and use) different channels – from email marketing to SEO experiments. However, the marketing environment is dynamic, and technological trends are even more changing.

But what does the future hold for inbound marketing? What new technologies, trends, and strategies will shape how businesses attract and engage customers in 2023 and beyond?

In this article, we will explore the exciting future of inbound marketing and the key trends and predictions that businesses need to be aware of to stay ahead of the curve.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a methodology that aims to attract, engage, and delight customers by providing them with valuable content and experiences that align with their interests and needs. It’s a customer-centric approach focuses on building long-term customer relationships rather than just making quick sales check out the best Marketing jobs.

At its core, inbound marketing involves creating and sharing content that educates, entertains, or solves a problem for the target audience. This content can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media posts, etc. The goal is to provide value to the audience, establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry, and ultimately attract potential customers to your website or other digital platforms.

Why Inbound Marketing Is Important

The modern market makes you reach deeper and sophisticate your marketing efforts, regardless of whether you’re a small business owner or a mature SaaS company. But how? The answer will be – keeping up with the latest inbound marketing trends.

Inbound marketing has three main advantages compared to traditional marketing:

• It helps to reduce costs. Practically, inbound marketing approaches are 62% less expensive than outbound marketing.
• It helps to grow traffic and attract new customers.
• It helps with visibility and brand recognition.

Of course, this is not the limit. Inbound marketing lets you play a long game. Evolve with everchanging marketing activities by the latest user demands and get the ability to solve your customer’s problems more effectively full-time. The calculation is simple: users face a problem, you show them a ready-made solution, you ignite their interest, and finally, they make a purchase.

The Role of SEO in Inbound Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in inbound marketing. It optimizes your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract more organic traffic. With 93% of all online experiences starting with a search engine and 75% of users never scrolling past the first page of search results, SEO is more important than ever for businesses that want to succeed online.

The following are some of the key ways in which SEO supports and enhances inbound marketing:

1. Increases visibility and traffic: Optimizing your website and content for relevant keywords can improve your visibility in search engine results pages and attract more organic traffic to your site.
2. Builds trust and credibility: When your website ranks higher in search results, it signals to users that you are a reputable and trustworthy source of information.
3. Enhances user experience: SEO involves optimizing your website’s structure, navigation, and content for both users and search engines, which can improve the overall user experience and encourage visitors to stay on your site longer.
4. Drives lead generation: By attracting more targeted traffic to your website, you can increase your chances of generating leads and converting visitors into customers.

To effectively incorporate SEO into your inbound marketing strategy, you should:

• Conduct thorough keyword research and incorporate relevant keywords into your website and content.
• Optimize your website’s structure, navigation, and content for users and search engines.
• Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve your website’s authority and credibility.
• Regularly create and publish high-quality, informative content that aligns with your target audience’s interests and needs.

Inbound Marketing Trends To Try In 2023

Broad your horizons and check the best global marketing trends to promote your business like a pro below.

Heavily Use Your Marketing Data

Data flood the web. As you see below, it is estimated that there are currently about 5.16 billion Internet users worldwide.

Source: Statista

Each person produces tons of data. So, one of the first inbound marketing trends to consider is fully leveraging.

Among other benefits, marketing channel data help create a complete user persona and track user behavior. Besides, companies can take advantage of the more dynamic marketing environment the data brings:

• Marketing data is measurable, so you’ll see outcomes more clearly.
• Marketing data helps to automate many processes to simplify and improve marketing efforts – from an email sent to marketing reporting.
• Active marketing data use crucial to understanding the following steps, making decisions, and adjusting your marketing strategy.

Quickly collecting and carefully analyzing marketing data is an ongoing inbound marketing trend. Though, its impact is only enhancing this year.

Include The Human Touch In Personalization

Personalization is the presence and will be the future of marketing because it’s the key to building deeper relationships with customers and giving them more value.

However, what becomes critical in 2023 is the growing demand for the human touch and real emotions in marketing campaigns. We’re getting used to AI and automation, so people need tailored messages with real personalization.

In this way, spend some time crafting personalized content, offers, and very segmented marketing campaigns. Also, remember your audience-specific language. For example, it’s okay to refer to memes and use new words if it’s a Gen Z audience.

Overall, a more sophisticated, precise, and human-oriented approach to personalization should work better than regular FirstName-type personalization.

Share Experience In Your Content (E.E.A.T.)

Undoubtedly, websites to be visible on the first page of search results should be high quality. Take a closer look at a progressive content marketing trend from Google, who have added another E for their E.A.T. guide:

• Experience – applied content that genuinely creates value
• Expertise (specialization) – information created for the website should be developed primarily based on knowledge provided by experts or people who work closely with them.
• Authoritativeness – high-quality websites are websites that are an authority in a given field
• Trustworthiness – a website that is to be rated well should inspire trust in users

Optimized content may not be enough to rank high in 2023. Producing a blog post or a landing page nowadays, you should focus specifically on Experience (E). Namely, provide first-hand experience, use case outcomes, give a new view on the same issue, and prove your expertise in a particular niche.

It’s Time To Try Interactive Marketing Tactics

This year may be an excellent time to experiment with interactive marketing more than a traditional accept-or-reject approach to conveying a message to customers. So, the list of top digital marketing trends would only be complete with this trend.

As an illustration, social media platforms have set the course on fewer words and more interactions. Facebook has introduced playable ads as a way for sellers to allow potential players to try out selected items before purchasing them. Also, many brands use the interactivity of Instagram, engaging potential customers in a new and unconventional way.

To experiment with this inbound marketing trend, consider trying the following:

• Quizzes
• Surveys and polls
• Giveaways or discounts per some actions
• Interactive ads and videos
• Different sorts of calculators
• Live dashboards

Like heatmap solutions and social media analytics tools, interactive marketing tactics can give you more information about your audience. Respectively, you can better engage with them and attract more potential customers. With a quiz builder or survey maker tool, you can easily create interactive quizzes or polls to engage your customers and collect valuable data.

Reshape Product Pages Of Your Website

Proper optimization of product pages gives you higher ranking, traffic, and conversions. In 2023, think about designing your product pages and closely paying attention to UX.

Do you remember E.E.A.T.? It’s applicable for landing and product pages, too. The thing is that Google needs the best quality content from you to position your page higher in SERP. That’s why you need to consider reshaping your product pages:

• Keep the balance between visual and textual content
• Optimize underperforming content
• Place testimonials and reviews
• Use drop-down lists
• Add FAQ blocks
• Optimize images (both technically and SEO-wise)
• Experiment with videos

An example of FAQ usage on a product page (Source: Outreach Monks)

SEO for product pages is one of the ongoing marketing trends you should consider.

Don’t Ignore Updating Your Content

Content marketing trends should not only be about creating something new. It is equally important to update existing content:

• Refresh outdated numbers
• Add new information
• Share expertise or unique angle
• Incorporate quotes or testimonials
• Change or add visuals

Some examples of content worth considering updating:

• Guides and ‘how-to’ articles. Make sure your guides are up-to-date and credible.
• Content with recommendations. Dilute long bland recommendations with brief quotes from the experts in your field.
• Product pages. We discussed it in a previous trend, so try out those examples.
• Content that already ranks high and attracts a lot of traffic. Some may assume that if a page has a high ranking, it is better not to touch it. Those forget that the competitors focus on taking your place with more trustworthy and fresh content.

Updating your content is one of the SEO trends, too. So keyword optimization here is a must. Still, remember that you produce content for people foremost.

Pay Attention To Voice Search Optimization

Voice search optimization is one of the popular SEO trends. To implement voice search optimization effectively, you need to:

• Have a mobile-friendly website,
• Technically optimize your website (especially download speed),
• Implement a proper schema markup,
• Use FAQ sections actively,
• Search for conversational keywords.

This inbound marketing trend will be helpful for local brands and companies working with younger audiences since they actively use voice search. That’s why you should consider whether services or products on a given website are addressed to a target group likely to use voice search daily.

Remember this and relate it to your customer age segment targeting when deciding whether to position your website for voice search.

Be Aware Of Chatgpt4

ChatGPT3 is, without a doubt, the loudest technology trend in marketing today. Simultaneously, its advanced version ChatGPT4 should appear in 2023.

Many marketers embrace this technology trend. Many are skeptical about this technology. In both scenarios, we need to be aware of its presence and know how it can help us.

For example, a new version of ChatGPT will help you:

1. Get inspired with promotional ideas
2. Understand the needs of your customers
3. Have a quick overview of current happenings
4. Translate content on your website
5. Automatically answer frequently asked questions

In any case, marketing experts must treat this tool as a helper rather than a solver of all problems. As we outlined above, the human touch in marketing is very important.

Show Respect To Video Marketing

Video marketing is the must-have content marketing trend in your marketing strategy.

Source: Personify

The number of hours the average Internet user spends watching videos online increases from year to year. We, marketers, need to use it actively!

Search engines, social media, and streaming platforms analyze videos’ content and suggest relevant videos to users. Besides, the success of TikTok has shown that many customers appreciate short and focused content. YouTube and Instagram have already introduced similar features, and this type of communication is likely to become dominant.

Still trying to tell about yourselves with the help of BTS peak or explainer video production? You can lose this race.

Join The Rise Of Influencer Marketing

One of the global marketing trends is that companies are moving away from traditional advertising forms, allocating more budgets to cooperation with influencers. Importantly, it has become a substantial part of marketing efforts for small and medium-sized business segments.

People stop noticing intrusive display ads or ignore them. In this way, influencers are often authority figures for members of their fan community. Users trust influencers, and this impacts their consumer behavior.

Relying on the opinion of an expert or famous niche figure also saves a lot of time that users would have to spend on independent research and comparing products.

Creating influencer marketing trends can help users escape from the paradox of choice. It is a relatively new phenomenon that describes how the massive selection of available options makes it challenging to make an accurate and satisfactory decision.

Confidential advice from your favorite YouTuber can solve this dilemma.

Demonstrate Inclusivity And Social Responsibility In Your Marketing

We live in times when all social inequalities are becoming more pronounced. Brands meet this need through inclusive marketing, which does not divide but connects.

Source: Cleverism

Through the latest inbound marketing trends, experts try to involve everyone in their campaigns – regardless of skin color, sexual orientation, or body shape. But won’t inclusive marketing become just a fad?

Time will tell whether big words and refined campaigns will be more than insignificant declarations. People are all different – both within local communities and globally. None of your users is the same as a more human approach teaches us, but each is a consumer. Purchasing decisions are not made by a group but by individuals, so shouldn’t inclusiveness and social responsibility be the essence of marketing and its most important feature?

Recap

Global marketing trends constantly appear: some fail, and some become regular activities. To forecast which trend will remain is pretty hard.

One thing is clear: marketing professionals must stay creative, flexible, and open to testing those emerging activities. The above-described 11 picks for inbound marketing trends aren’t exceptions.

We hope you’ll find time and resources to follow all or some of these activities in 2023. Or you’re already using them, which is excellent, and have your vision of their effectiveness to share with the marketing community.

About Author

Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io, an all-in-one data analytics and automation platform. He has over 3 years of experience in digital marketing, particularly in SaaS. Apart from experimenting with marketing tactics, he’s a huge NBA fan.

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