7 Digital Marketing Trends in Canada For 2023

7 Digital Marketing Trends to make your business Stand Out in Canada For 2023

Technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, so of course, some of these trends are focused around technology. However, there’s also a pushback against the increased digitization and automation of interactions between brands and consumers.

The marketing trends that will dominate in the next 12 months will include Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, and Content Visualization.

Trends that will optimize your company

Customer Retention

Story Driven Content

Personalization: Solve Problems

World Class Customer Service

Push Notifications

Featured Snippets Google Ads

AI-Based Automation

Social Media Platforms

Online Shoppers Over The Age Of 27

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Average # Of Social Accounts Per Person

1. Customer Retention

A huge part of providing a great customer experience is making sure that CX is ongoing and focused on keeping your existing customers, rather than just attracting new ones.

Recurring customers are more valuable than new customers. Studies have found that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep a new one, so it’s definitely worth putting in the effort to keep your customers happy.

Loyal customers also help to increase the reputation and awareness of your brand as they’ll talk about your company and products with their friends and family. Happy customers make great (and free!) brand ambassadors and influencers.

Many of the above-mentioned trends and technology can be helpful for increasing customer retention rates. Personalization, for example, is certainly expected from your existing customers if not your new ones, and it gets easier to personalize communications the more interactions someone has with your brand.

2. Story Driven Content

With the explosion of smart speakers and voice search in recent years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “readable” content is more important than visuals and design these days.

In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While advancements in voice search are certainly influencing the way that we’ll create content now and in the future, you shouldn’t neglect visual content and the basic elements of brand storytelling.

Research has shown that people prefer visual content to plain text. You just have to look at the growth of image-focused platforms Pinterest and Instagram to see the proof of this.

3. Personalization: Solve Problems

When a customer has two relatively equal products in front of her, and she needs to decide which one she’ll buy, my money’s on the brand that won her heart. One of the ways to engage your customers’ hearts as well as their heads is to personalize marketing to meet their needs.

For years, psychologists have taught us that people love to hear their name and see it in print. But today’s technology allows digital marketing teams to dig deep into the data to identify the things that keep customers up at night – and identify what messages will solve those problems and give them a good night’s sleep.

4. World Class Customer Service

The growth of online content has given consumers more power. They are no longer a passive party when it comes to learning about products. They’re not waiting for you to tell you how great your products are. Instead, they’re going out and doing their own research.

Efficiency, convenience, knowledgeable and friendly service, and easy payment options are what people value most in their customer experience. But aspects more traditionally considered as marketing’s domain are cited too: up-to-date technology, personalization, an easy mobile experience, brand image, and design all add up to the overall customer experience.

5. Push Notifications

Two things are driving the emergence of push notifications as a digital marketing trend. First, the email marketing landscape is becoming so saturated that it’s only getting more difficult to truly connect with your audience through that channel. Second, people are increasingly using mobile phones for all types of online activity — including brand search and online shopping.

It makes sense, then, that brands are turning to push notifications as a more effective way to capture customer attention. Today, more than half of consumers are allowing push notifications on their phone so brands can get in touch with them.

6. Featured Snippets Google Ads

SEO will continue to be an important aspect of digital marketing as we move into 2023, but we’re now seeing one of the most major shifts in the SEO industry in the last decade.

With the growth of mobile and voice search, people are changing the way they use search engines like Google. Being number one in the search engine result pages or SERPS is no longer necessarily the primary goal your business should be aiming for.

You’ve probably noticed your own search and browsing behavior has changed in the last few years due to Google changes and the fact that you’re looking for the fastest information when you’re on the move.

Featured snippets and other “on SERP” information means that you don’t need to click through to a website to get the information you’re looking for anymore – it’s right there on the Google search results page.

This on-SERP information may appear in various places, but the most sought after position is right at the top of the page, before the organic listings. This position has been dubbed “position zero”. As it’s often the only information that a searcher will view, it’s highly coveted. Over 60% of search results returned by Google are now featured snippets.

7. AI-Based Automation

We’ve already seen huge advancements in AI over the last few years, and a great increase in the number of businesses using AI-powered technology and automation to assist their marketing efforts.

AI is one of the major technologies behind voice search and smart assistants. It’s also made chatbots possible, which are now popping up on more websites than ever before. AI technology and automation are helping to take some of the grunt work out of marketing so brands can concentrate on strategy and crafting a fantastic customer experience.

And there has been a ton of progress made this year on AI-based image enhancement and AI-writing tools. Our key takeaway: humans are going to continue to be important to content creation and marketing for the foreseeable future.

Remember, the human aspect of marketing is still important (perhaps more important than ever before), so the idea is to use this technology to enhance your marketing efforts, not replace the real people behind them.