It’s 2023, and how you’ll promote your business this year will differ from how you’ve done it in the past. So many new opportunities would help, and this article will teach you the most powerful digital marketing strategies for 2023. You can use these strategies to take your business to the next level. 

Marketing falls into five categories, so we’ll look at each one, and I’m going to share with you the single thing that’s working best right now for each, along with actionable tips that you can use to execute them.

Content marketing

Content marketing is about short-form vertical videos – TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. It was the first Instagram to rip off TikTok to create its Reels. The CEO of Instagram admitted Instagram is no longer a picture-sharing app.

Next was YouTube when they introduced Shorts. Whenever these social media giants roll out new features, they incentivize users to use them with more views, bringing more visibility and engagement. If this was last year, I might be sceptical about going in on this trend because they were new and may not last. However, the short-form video is here to stay this year.

If you are worried, this will only attract Gen Zs; that is no longer the case, as TikTok’s user base is ageing. 53% of its users are now over the age of thirty. So you can reach an even more mature audience when you post those same videos as reels on Instagram.

What should you post and how often to get the best results?

Studies have shown that if you want to grow on these platforms, you must post at least one video daily. To prove how powerful daily reels can be, Instagram expert Dominic Rieger challenged five random students to do just that. The ones who stuck with it for sixty days saw their follow accounts explode to over 33,000 people. Those who only posted once per week grew by about 50 followers.

The big question is, How do you create and post a video daily?

The truth is, it is not as complicated as you think, and here are some tips to speed up video production so you can post one video daily;

1. Don’t be perfect about the production value. Your videos don’t have to look like oscar-winning masterpieces! It is about something other than this video. There are a few types of videos that you can create with minimal planning.

• Offer quick tip advice on a process you use
• A surprising statistic related to your industry
• A product you love
• A book you recommend or a tool that you can’t live without

2. You can present any of these ideas in several ways. You can talk straight to the camera, with some related point-of-view video in the background, text on a screen, or even with the green screen feature.

3. This works best if you just put aside a Time block of a few hours every week to work on batching all the videos for the following week. I know it sounds like a lot of work here, but at the end of the day, these videos are all super short, like seven to thirty seconds. When you consider that you can reuse them on three major platforms, the exposure you can get is well worth it.

Search engine marketing

If you want to get found in search this year, there is a brand new Google Update that you need to know about. They call it their helpful content update. The update is about getting back to content written for people.

For years people have focused on writing content for the Google search algorithm. That is what SEO is, right? Optimizing website content for the search engine. Therefore, knowing a few actionable things, business owners can do with their websites if they want to rank in Google search in 2023. First, we need to think about what is the intent of the user when they search.

For instance, your sales page should have answers to the questions that people are likely searching for.  You want to make sure those are covered, so we need to be complete on our significant SEO page. Therefore, visitors are not left with questions they search for on our competitors’ websites.

On a sales page, ensure you answer the questions people are searching for. A home page should rank for the service you offer, so you must think through the search queries people are searching for. Then, create the most helpful content that answers that.

For example, a smart home company in Nigeria would find that there needs to be more content about the prices of smart home appliances in the country. Hence, they can write content that answers this question, not just how much the cost of devices, but how much it costs in the country. They can go as granular as you get at different price levels.

The great thing about this update is that it generally means you can create fewer pages and posts in 2023. So just go all in on a handful of your most important ones. Remember going deep in a few key places will get you better results than going shallow and broad.

Social media marketing

We have the rise of user-generated content, otherwise known as having influencers create stuff on social for you, and influencers bring many benefits. For example, 61% of viewers trust the product recommendations they get from the influencers they follow now. Compare that to only 38% that trust social media content put out by you as a business. That is why this is such a significant one of the digital marketing strategies for 2023. Before you write this off as too expensive or too hard to coordinate, here is something that could help you with influencer marketing on social media.

TikTok Creator Marketplace

This platform makes hiring the best influencer for your brand incredibly easy. TikTok is not only the fastest-growing social media platform, and like I said, it is ageing every day. With their Creator Marketplace, you can find the right influencers on any budget, negotiate terms, and get them started through the platform. You don’t have to search for the contact info and then email them or DM them like you used to; nobody has time for all that. It works through the Creator Marketplace. Once you set up your account, you can use the filters they’ve got to find the best influencers for your audience. You can filter things like;

• Their location (country, region, etc.)
• Their follower counts
• Average views per video 
• Engagement rate 

Sometimes it is better to go for people with lower follower accounts because Nano influencers with smaller followings of one to ten thousand have much higher engagement rates. For example, the average Nano influencer’s engagement rate is around 5.6% as opposed to 2.15% for those mid-tier influencers or 1.19% for those Mega influencers. But you probably can’t afford a Kardashian anyway, so let’s keep things realistic.

Where it gets exciting is you can filter it down by topics these influencers focus on as of right now. This is a partial list, so this will likely only be viable if your business has a broad appeal. If you can narrow your audience based on these high-level interests and basic demographics like age, gender, and location and this is pretty cool. It lets you filter by fast-growing creators only, which is one of the things you’d want to be looking for when choosing someone. You can start seeing their prices immediately and see what their typical content looks like.

I recommend checking out each profile before reaching out to them to make sure that their analytics look decent, but from there, you just choose the influencers you’d like to work with. Pick the goal of the campaign, then fill out all the info related to the campaign, then you make an offer, and then it is up to them to either accept it or not. I recommend working with several at a time because that gives you more chances for some of these posts to go viral.

These posts go viral on their own, and you can turn these influencer posts into paid TikTok ads or spark ads. These ads can be incredibly effective, and you are essentially getting these TikTok Pros to create your ads for you. Just choose the posts with the highest level of organic engagement and throw a little money behind them to push them out even further.

Email marketing

While email isn’t the newest, shiniest, or sexiest category, it is the most profitable. Email marketing has a 42 times ROI on average, so for every dollar you put into your email marketing campaigns, you’re likely to make 42 dollars in return. However, for email marketing to work, you must correctly get your ideal customers’ email addresses. That is why you need lead magnets. A lead magnet is anything you can dangle in front of your prospects in exchange for their email address. ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ is not enough; offer actionable downloads like a checklist, cheat sheet, or even a video series.

Interactive lead magnets usually get higher opt-in rates, and your potential customer usually gets a better result. This is because they’re more invested in it. Two great interactive lead magnets for 2023 are timed challenges and quizzes. A timed challenge is a great way to build many touch points with your opt-ins from five to thirty days.

It works by figuring out what goal or result you want to promise to help your prospects achieve on their own with your guidance. You then work backwards to nail down all the baby steps to help them get there and how many days they’ll need to do it. Some standard periods for these challenges or five, seven, ten, or fourteen; usually, the shorter you can make it, the better. Every day for the duration of the challenge, you email them with that day’s activity or assignment they need to complete, and this works even better if you can vary how you deliver the information. For instance, if you can sprinkle some videos into your emails every once in a while, you’ll take that relationship-building to a whole new level.

A quiz works particularly great if you want to tailor your advice or action plan to each person’s unique circumstances. You use an online quiz builder like tryinteract.com to ask questions similar to what you might ask in a one-on-one consultation. Therefore, in the end, they arrive at a result that kicks off you sending them something just for that specific result.

Pay-per-click Marketing (PPC)

This strategy is a game changer when it comes to paid advertising. It helps you show up everywhere online all at once. Thanks to Google’s new campaign type, Performance Max, there is an easy way to achieve that. This Google ad campaign type enables you to appear all over the internet in front of the right people at the right time automatically without needing to become a Google ads expert. In the present online space, people need to see you constantly to remember your brand, which is why being everywhere is effective. However, time and money are limited resources, so how can you be present everywhere online without breaking the bank?

Performance Max

Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type that, as the name implies, is focused on maximizing performance. Specifically, it is about optimizing the performance of Google ad campaigns to increase conversions. When most people think of Google ads, they visualize search ads. When some search for a business like yours on Google, you can pay to show up first. That is great, but the search engine result page (SERP) is just one touch point out of several. When you run a performance Max campaign, you’ll be able to run those search ads, but it’s also going to open you up to new audiences that Google’s AI predicts will be high converters for you across all of Google’s ad channels this includes;

• YouTube
• Display Ads which you’ll see on blog posts and other websites
• Discover
• Gmail
• Maps
• And the mighty Google search

Google knows a crazy amount of value based on what you search for sites you visit, where you physically go, and the videos you watch on YouTube. All those insights let Google accurately predict who will be most likely to convert for you even when they don’t specifically search.

To run a performance Max campaign, all you need to do is provide Google with the following;

• your goal
• your budget
• some targeting info and;
• some creative assets

Google learns what works best through machine learning, essentially figuring out the patterns and automating the best sequence of touch points your customers need before finally converting into a customer or client. In other words, it should automatically get better and more profitable the more you use it.

Need help with Digital Marketing?

There are two ways to execute digital marketing for your business;

1. Give your time and effort
2. Pay someone else to do it

Whatever your option, your business can’t thrive without proper marketing. If you are busy with the other moving parts of your business, it is prudent to outsource your promotion to an experienced digital marketer in Nigeria.

If you need someone to work with you to promote your business online this year, you are home! Contact me now for an insightful discussion about marketing for your business; consultation is free.