Advice to Close Out Your 2022 Marketing + Prepare for 2023

As 2022 comes to a close, we asked our marketing experts for advice on some of the most common questions we’re hearing! Learn from their decades of marketing and ecommerce ecosystem expertise as they unpack what marketers need to prepare for in today’s economic climate. 

Want to learn more? Check out the full recording of our “Cyber Week is Over… Now What?” fireside chat.

Featured Speakers

Vibhor Kapoor, Chief Marketing Officer
Cathy Bergstrom, Sr. Director of Product Management
Lizzie Chapman, VP Technology Partnerships & Channels

Budgets

With budgets likely running low at year’s end, what are a few low or no cost actions marketers can take to close out 2022 strong?

CPMs are high - now is not the time to reinvent the wheel and try new things, but to lean into what is going well and take advantage of your company’s unique trends. As a marketer, it’s important to constantly gather data, analyze results, draw insights, and optimize. Now more than ever, this should be your top priority. 

• Focus on your high-intent shoppers (i.e. cart abandoners) with retargeting campaigns that are orchestrated across multiple channels.

• Provide incentives to buy now through discounts tied to contact collection. For example, enter email for promo code available until 12/10 with a countdown timer and promote those promos via email and ads.

  • Ensure your product fulfillment is integrated with your marketing campaign activities. For example, you want to make sure that if you are targeting a cart abandoner with a product, that it’s in stock. 

  • Be transparent about delivery speeds on your site and in marketing creative. Narvar found that 53% of consumers won’t even consider making a purchase if time of delivery isn’t communicated clearly.

• Keep selling to the end user, not just the gift buyer. Deloitte report mentioned above, 78% of consumers say they make gift-type purchases for themselves during the holiday season.

• Stop spending where you don’t need to. Take a look at your current platforms and integrations to see where you can save. Platforms like AdRoll that include unlimited email marketing to help you continue to target your audience without breaking the bank.

• Encourage customers to share how they're celebrating with your products on social media to foster advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing.

What measures can marketers take to prepare their businesses for the projected impact of the current macroeconomic climate?

Our macroeconomic climate continues to be turbulent and while we have no way to predict the intensity or duration, there are learnings from the past that can be our guide.

• Ensure brand awareness stays a key part of the marketing strategy. Marketing experts Les Binet and Peter Field conducted an analysis with about a thousand brands over 25 years and determined that “companies cutting investment by 50% for one year before returning to normal weight take up to 2 years to recover lost share.” While budgets may be limited, be sure you continue to invest in your brand awareness marketing efforts.

• Performance management of marketing campaigns is key. Understand attribution of your efforts but doing that piecemeal, channel by channel is not an option. Make sure your strategy is being executed to the best ROI across all channels, understand what’s performing best to get your message to the right person in the right channel, at the right time, for the BEST outcome.

  • Using analytics such as AdRoll’s cross-channel dashboard can help you to see a more holistic view of all your marketing channel performance, ensuring you can adjust quickly in the changing environment. 

• Utilize integrations. Take advantage of connecting all your platforms through available integrations to save time manually transferring data & information.

  • Collect prospective & current customers’ email & phone numbers to store your audiences in your ecomm, CRM, or CDP platform and connect those audiences to your marketing and advertising platforms.

  • Connect your martech reporting to your revenue source of truth to accurately understand where performance is coming from.

• Take advantage of automations. Your ecommerce platform is your company's brain, it knows about product fulfillment, sales, customer interactions, etc. Make sure to connect your ecommerce data to your marketing platforms, then set up automations one time that will help drive sales indefinitely.

Trends

Given the current landscape, what trends do you see emerging in digital marketing in 2023? 

Generative AI Technologies (Vibhor)

The promise of the solutions that use Generative AI is helping marketers with copy for emails or blogs, images for social media content, and even title and subject lines that are more effective. Like many other technologies in the last two decades, I believe these are complementary to the work digital marketers do, not a substitute. The opportunity is in faster iteration and in feedback and learning loops that will result in a better end outcome and higher performance in campaigns.

Omnichannel Customer Experiences (Cathy)

As consumers have more choice, the experience they have becomes your differentiator. Creating seamless experience across all touchpoints - from your website to social media, email, and beyond. 

• Making your paid marketing compliment your owned channels rather than thinking of them as separate campaigns

• Doing more with less; finding ways to build compelling digital content to engage consumers with your brand in the most cost-effective ways

TikTok, Microinfluencers, and Shoppable Ads (Lizzie)

Tiktok currently has the highest growth rate of all social media platforms. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in 2021, with over 656 million downloads. In the same year, TikTok was also the first app since Facebook to surpass three billion downloads. 

• Look at paid advertising opportunities. Whether directly through TikTok or by connecting to a marketing platform like AdRoll to help you advertise effectively on the channel.

• Build influencer partnerships. Influencers have already built trust with their followers and this can help build brand trust and awareness for your company. Specifically, look at micro-influencers who are already talking about your industry. Their content tends to see higher engagement rate than larger accounts and is a great way to test the channel with a limited budget.

• Create organic content. Pay attention to trends happening on channels and test out new things. The benefit of organic content is the low-cost, you don’t need to outsource production for this and can often film it on your own phone.

• Stay up-to-date on what channels offer Shoppable Video Ads. Having an “add to cart” button on your video ad makes it easy for customers to interact with your content and start buying. YouTube recently released a new shoppable ad program with the YouTube shorts that functions similar to Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. New shoppable ads & livestreaming offerings will be coming in 2023, so keep an eye for these opportunities.  

Preparation & Planning

What is an important piece of annual planning that marketers often underestimate the value of? 

In unpredictable markets, one may be tempted to ask “is there any value in making annual plans?” Now is the time to plan - learn from the past, plan for the future, and plan for the unknown.

• Make plans based on learnings from 2022. Have assertions and principles behind them.

• Keep plans dynamic. Be open to the notion of evolving them as the environment changes. 

• New marketing channels will emerge. The market is always changing, think about how quickly TikTok took off and marketers needed to adapt. Find a partner that can help you to learn, understand, and be successful on new channels and new tech as it emerges.

• Look at new technologies and be open to change. Take the time to look at your current partners (ecommerce site, shipping, marketing, etc.) and review the value of their services and adaptability. A strong partner will be one that continues to update and iterate based on trends to make it easy for you to stay relevant.

• Prepare for a cookie-less world. 3rd-party cookie depreciation is coming, and being prepared will be your key to success in years to come.

  • Building strong known contact profiles that include email and phone numbers. Offer customer incentives, valuable newsletter subscriptions, loyalty programs, and ensure you’re capturing data in a privacy compliant way to future proof your marketing.

  • Utilize your partners and talk to them about their plans and recommendations in the face of industry changes. Depending on the type of marketing the platform does, their plans will be different. For example on the AdRoll ads side, we are heavily involved in the Google Privacy Sandbox for the future of targeting/measuring on Google Chrome and testing an array of 3P identifiers, learn more about our furture-proofing efforts and advice. 

Expert Advice from AdRoll

Vibhor

• Plan the work and work the plan -  do not let the dynamic situation with the market and economy deter you from thinking ahead in 2023

• You cannot improve what you do not measure - Understand performance, optimize campaigns and keep that as an always on approach

• Integrate customer advocacy into your plans: There is no better marketing than customers advocating for your products on social media, through reviews and  word of mouth. That is one of the most sustainable ways to build brand long term.

Cathy

• Customer journey centricity: Think of the journey your customer is going through when building your marketing campaigns. Meet them along all touch points of that journey, they don't think in marketing channels and so your campaign shouldn’t be channel dependent. 

• Personalization: Ensure you’re delivering a cohesive, personalized experience across ads, emails, and your website.

Lizzie

• Focus on full funnel attribution and avoid conversion tunnel vision: Know what type of creative and channels drive brand awareness vs. prospecting vs. conversions because you have to feed the top of the funnel to see growth at the bottom. 

• Make the most of the platforms you are using or looking to use: Utilize their integrations, automations and resources to learn about marketing trends and industry changes. For AdRoll customers, please utilize us as a resource for 3rd party cookie deprecation and your 1st party data plan, among many other trends!  

• Plan for innovation and testing: Set budget aside to test new channels and creative formats, you never know what will be game-changing if you don’t take the shot!

Prepare for 2023 With AdRoll

Bonus: Audience Questions

• What creative ads work best? Check out Creative Best Practices for Digital Marketers. 

• What is the best way for me to minimize my time investment to maximize my marketing? Check out 8 Data-Driven Marketing Tools to Increase Your ROI. 

• What's a good email cadence for engaged customers and not-so-engaged customers? Check out Email Marketing 101: Audience Building and Email Content.

• Is SEO worthwhile if using Google & FB ads?

Special Guest Advice from Shae Henrie, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at AdRoll

"Yes! Paid ads and organic efforts work together. The best way to describe this is thinking about paid as a faucet to turn on the lead flow. SEO is a long-term game. This is your lead river growing over time. Your organic position in search engine results can also assist your paid efforts indirectly.

SEO can be less expensive as well, which means that you don't have to spend in order to see results. This makes SEO an effort you can start without adding budget.

It's highly recommended that you invest your time in both areas."

Last updated on December 14th, 2022.