The world of print and marketing moves faster than ever in today’s ever changing-world. It has been a rollercoaster ride for business, marketers, and consumers in the last few years, and that is not going to stop, making it even more important to track the up-and-coming marketing trends of 2023.
These trends focus on providing a better quality and satisfying experience for your customers, in print and online, with both markets growing rapidly for advertising. Print is also still trending upwards, with 72% of corporations utilizing direct mail campaigns in 2022 ([1]). Marketers are now tasked with managing both print and web to deliver the best experience for the consumer and the best return on investment for the business. Here are 5 Print and Marketing trends to help keep you on track in 2023.
- Quality, Not Quantity
- Focusing on Current Clients & Great Customer Experience
- Multiple Marketing Channels, One Visual Voice
- Corporate is Out, the Local & Personalized Approach is In
- Be Social. Social Commerce & Influencer Marketing
Quality, Not Quantity
In 2023, it’s necessary to promote your brand in a way that provides quality to your consumers. From the quality of your logo and graphics, to your paper and social posts, your customers will not look at something that is not worth their time, so stand out with quality above the rest.
In print, quality is all about the texture and the paper. It has been widely estimated that every adult in the U.S. receives as much as 41 pounds of unsolicited mail per year. ([2]) So the average person knows what cheap, mass produced promotional material feels like, and they know to just toss it. But quality says good things about a brand, and good paper that feels new is the way to go this year.
Quality on the web is all about providing your viewers and recipients with something of substance this year. This could simply be important information like a change in business hours, new products, or parking information – you don’t have to provide sales, event dates, or even giveaways and coupon codes to give your customers quality.
Focus on what content you are sending over just getting it out.
Finally, don’t post or print a blurry or pixelated logo or graphic. It’s 2023 — most of the consumer population grew up with technology and will lose trust in a brand who seemingly doesn’t care to invest in their public appearance. If you have an old or blurry logo or graphic, consider a redesign or a reprint to display quality this year.
P.S. Have a blurry image you need help with? Ask our Prepress Team!
Focusing on Current Clients & Great Customer Experience
Brand loyalty can feel like it’s at an all-time low with the abundance of options online, and on top of that customer acquisition costs are at a high. It costs upwards of five times more to find a new customer than to win more business with an existing customer. ([3]) So the trend in 2023 is that brands are putting in a little extra effort to aid and engage their current customers in a movement to re-inspire brand loyalty.
Providing a great customer experience can be challenging. Once upon a time, the only experience a customer had with a business was in person, but for 2023, a great customer experience starts online. A clear, easy-to-navigate, mobile-friendly-website is key to your start to great customer experience today. Your next key is social media, where many brands are turning to answer questions from customers and provide support on a platform they know.
The trend is to try to actively engage current customers. Keep in touch with them, collect emails and contact information. Send a thank-you when something is purchased, or even send out Christmas cards. Even providing a small discount for past customers may incentivize them to come back again and again, saving you the cost of acquiring another new customer.
P.S. Our marketing team can help you nurture new clients, ask us how!
Multiple Marketing Channels, One Visual Voice
Customers can go through the entire purchasing process for many businesses without ever speaking to a person, so today the trend is presenting a visual voice for your brand. This visual voice is your branding and how you visually market your brand. Customers don’t just interact with your brand in one location, though, so it’s important to present one visual voice across all your marketing.
Consumers like consistency with brands. Your social media, website, blog, marketing materials, and print campaigns should carry the same voice, branding and imagery. Providing consistency makes customers more comfortable. For example, when you run email and direct mail marketing campaigns at the same time you can make sure the emails and the physical messages look visually like they are part of the same campaign, even if the words are different.
Why visual content? Well, unsurprisingly, research has shown that people prefer visual content to plain text. Even just adding one graphic gives text meaning and helps customers remember what they read.
Corporate is Out, the Local & Personalized Approach is In
After the last few years of the pandemic, consumers want a breath of fresh air. The trend is fresh, local, and personalized. In response, many marketers are switching from broad-reach campaigns to hyper personalized ones and local-reach movements using geolocation data to the fullest.
We all need a bit of fresh air after the last few years, and now it’s time to bring it into your marketing. Drop sterile, corporate stock photos from your marketing materials. Photos that look like stock photos feel impersonal and cold. Take photos yourself whenever possible, or consider replacing your stock photos with art or less corporate-looking stock photos. Update your website and re-print any old brochures or marketing materials to reflect a more personal feeling and warmth to your brand.
After you freshen up your marketing, try to trend personalized. People are more likely to respond well to a personalized ad – 80% of consumers said they would be more likely to do business with a brand that provides a personalized experience, according to a survey by Epsilon. ([4]) Think outside the box of ways to deliver a more unique and tailored experience for your customers. Beyond that, it’s no secret that we’ve always liked to see our name in print and with the ability to send out variables in both digital spaces and in physical printing there is no need to have generic “dear reader” messages in 2023.
Local marketing is far from a new idea, but it is given new life with geolocation services. There is value in customizing your marketing messages on a local level. Search engines running on smartphones are now capable of serving up targeted personal messages as soon as a potential customer is detected in a local area. Eight in 10 businesses currently use location data in their marketing strategy and 94% plan to do so in the future. ([5])
Our Local Consultants are happy to meet in person, by phone or online to discuss your next project.
Be Social. Social Commerce & Influencer Marketing
Any good marketer knows social commerce is a mainstream form of shopping in 2023. Brands are better than ever at integrating their e-commerce marketing strategy platforms with social media channels, however, what’s changing is the new popularity of short-form video, influencer marketing, and live video.
Short-form videos have a higher retention rate, and perform better in terms of SEO. Short and live videos are easier to produce compared with traditional, longer commercials, as they break down creative and production barriers even further. People spend on average three times longer on live videos than pre-recorded ones. Video is a marketers best friend, 93% of digital markets say that video is currently a core part of their content strategy, and is not going away any time soon. ([6])
Word-of-mouth advertising was once the strong back bone of marketing – people are just more likely to try something if someone they trust suggests it. Influencer marketing is the new word of mouth for the world of social media. Viewers like to think of their favorite YouTubers as their friends, so when their friends recommend your brand you get a great return on investment. Most marketing professionals – 93%, in fact – use influencer marketing to increase brand awareness, reach their target audience, generate leads and connect with a wider market, so it might just be the trend for you. ([7])
Boost your influencer performance with QR codes on printed materials to help connect an in-person experience to online content.
