The Most Popular Marketing and Sales Trends for 2023

people discussing marketing and sales trends around a table

The new year is approaching fast, so it’s never been a better time to look at upcoming marketing and sales trends for 2023. Though there’s always more trends that are sure to pop-up as the year goes on, taking advantage of these trends beforehand can help you stay ahead of the competition. Below, we’ve curated a list of trends we think are going to take off in the new year using a compilation of data, studies, and our own expertise.

Why Marketing and Sales Trends are Important

Marketing and sales trends can provide your company with a number of benefits, including:

  • Staying Competitive: The last thing you want is to fall behind. Keeping up with trends can help you stay competitive in the marketplace and ensure your competitors don’t outperform you. It’s especially dangerous if your competitors are leveraging trends that you’re not.
  • Experimenting with New Tactics: Trends don’t always work for every business, but experimenting with trends and new marketing tactics can help you see what works and what doesn’t. You might just discover new marketing and sales strategies you’d never thought of before.
  • Keeping Customer Relationships: Customers are often the first to discover or create trends that companies then adopt for their marketing and sales efforts. Using those trends can show your customers and clients that you’re relevant and adaptable. This can help keep your relationships with current customers and even develop new ones.

7 Marketing and Sales Trends for 2023

Here are seven marketing and sales trends you’ll likely see in the coming year:

1. Sales Automation

It’s been said that roughly a third of all sales operations can be automated with technology. From generating leads to organizing information, there are a lot of points in the sales process where businesses can implement a form of automation to improve their efficiency. In fact, the growth of sales automation software surged in 2020 to 10.9% reaching a value of $8.15 billion. Other forecasts have predicted that the growth will continue at a compounded rate of 8.3% exceeding $14.2 billion by 2027. 

But it’s not just automation that’s flourishing. In 2020, more than 50% of growing small businesses said they increased their general sales technology investments. That’s because sales technology, in general, has the potential to increase the effectiveness of your selling efforts. 

For example, data products like EDA have the ability to boost the marketing and sales strategies of businesses from dealers and manufacturers to lenders and aftermarket sales. You can search for prospective buyers in your area, see what type of equipment or products they currently own, and learn more about their buying cycle. Pair your sales experience with expert data from EDA to make the most of your sales and marketing strategies.

2. Influencer Marketing

Influencers are content creators who have a large following on social media and other digital platforms. Often, businesses will partner with influencers that share a similar target audience to boost their marketing efforts. These influencers advertise the business to promote its products or services and build its brand awareness.

Currently, the influencer marketing industry is set to reach $16.4 billion before the end of 2022. That’s probably because 93% of businesses have used influencer marketing in their campaigns. If you’re wondering why or how that might be, it’s important to remember that influencers can be more than just Instagram models.

In fact, though Instagram is still the most popular format for brands who engage in influencer marketing, 44% of businesses still said they used YouTube for their influencer marketing efforts in 2021.

YouTubers, podcasters, and other digital content creators all fit the influencer definition and target a wide range of audiences for different industries. That’s why the necessity and use of influencers will only continue to grow for 2023.

3. User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC), also known as consumer-generated content, is content created by consumers that relate to a specific product or service and are often published to social media or other digital platforms. Though similar to influencer marketing, UGC is not an established partnership between a company and someone who has influence over a target audience. 

Instead, the user is generally someone outside of the company who’s excited about the product or service and is sharing it with their friends and family. The company then shares that content on their social platforms to generate interest and awareness.

UGC can come in different forms, including social media posts, reviews, videos, and podcasts. And because it’s often non-distinguishable from normal digital content, it’s very popular. In fact, user generated content makes up 39% of weekly media hours consumed by Americans. And in 2020, 79% of people said that UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions

Basically, UGC is a great marketing tactic because it showcases naturally occurring and positive testimonials from your consumers and clients. Also, due to an increase in popularity for user-generated content apps, like TikTok, it’s predicted that this marketing trend will only continue to grow into the new year.

4. Form Building

Form building is the act of designing a visually appealing form where website visitors can input their contact information to learn more about your offering or download valuable content. This allows companies to build marketing lists, often for email, so they can market their products and services to these individuals directly. As new privacy laws have popped up across the globe, businesses are being encouraged to gather information and data on their customers using less invasive methods than they’ve employed in the past. 

Form building is just one example of how businesses can do this. It’s a great way to collect information from your customers willingly, compared to other methods like cookies and trackers. Thanks to these new privacy laws, and a strong desire from individuals to protect their information, don’t be surprised if you see a lot more form building and similar data collection strategies used by businesses in 2023.

5. Virtual Selling

Thanks to the pandemic, virtual selling has seen a huge upward trend. In 2020, 79% of businesses, across industries, were effectively using virtual selling. But that didn’t only include B2C companies. 92% of B2B buyers said they prefer virtual sales pitches over in-person ones. Though the United States has officially claimed the pandemic is over, it doesn’t look like virtual selling is going anywhere. Next to being popular for buyers, it’s also due to the fact that virtual sales helps to lower the cost of consumer or client interactions.

But that doesn’t mean virtual selling is the best sales tactic for every industry. Some companies have reported that they believed their win-rate for sales was 48.8% lower than their expectations when they focused their efforts on virtual selling. It all depends on your target audience and what they prefer. If you think your audience or customer base might be more interested in face-to-face interactions, you might be better off trying alternative selling tactics.

6. Self-Service

Just like virtual sales, self-service buying is also on the rise. According to a survey, 43% of consumers around the world would opt for a buying process that involves little-to-no interaction with sellers at all. For millennials, specifically, that number is as high as 57%. A study by salesforce also shows that out of 2,500 businesses across industry verticals, 43% have started to focus on contactless services as of August 2021. Basically, contactless and self-service sales tactics aren’t disappearing anytime soon and Randall Reilly has also found that to be the case thanks to our online equipment marketplace, Equipment Experts.

On Equipment Experts, businesses can host equipment for sale on a virtual marketplace that consumers can peruse on their own time. This allows them to cut out the middleman and use a virtual, contactless service to increase the awareness of their products and find a match for their equipment more easily. It combines two of the upcoming marketing trends for 2023, virtual and self-service selling, creating an effective and efficient sales platform.

7. Alternative Targeting Solutions

Google has announced its initiative to phase out all third-party cookies on Chrome by 2024. Though Safari and Firefox have already phased out their third-party cookies, Google’s announcement is a bit more impactful given that Chrome made up more than 60% of web browser traffic in 2022. It’s still another year or so before the process is complete, but marketers are already feeling uneasy about the future. Once Google finally phases out third-party cookies, 41% of marketers believe their biggest challenge will be their inability to track the right data

Currently, there are solutions to the disappearance of third-party cookies, including the use of first-party data. But 44% of marketers still worry they’ll need to increase their spending by 5-25% in order to reach the same goals they achieved in 2021. That’s why, in 2023, we’ll probably see a lot of businesses searching for alternative targeting solutions to ensure their advertisements remain effective.

Luckily, there are already alternatives in place to help businesses boost their marketing efforts before third-party cookies disappear for good. Randall Reilly currently offers targeting solutions through programmatic marketing and proprietary data that helps businesses improve their sales and marketing strategies. Not only do we have tools, like EDA and RigDig BI, that can help you find prospects in your area, we also have the ability to build a custom audience for your advertisements based on buyer behavior and curated data.

Pairing our expert data with programmatic advertising solutions, Randall Reilly can help you avoid any slowdowns from Google’s purging of third-party cookies and ensure you get ahead of the curve for an upcoming marketing trend. Contact us today to see how you can take advantage of our programmatic marketing services.

two people talking about something they see on the computer