The new year is a time for businesses to start planning for the year ahead. But first, they must take a look at what went right and wrong last year, and review practices and technologies that can help move the business forward.
2023 will see a lot of changes around the use and management of data. Read on to find out what our predictions are for the year ahead.
1. 2023 will be the year of adaptation and integration
“The last three years have been about disruption, recovery, and resilience. Now it’s time for adaptation — and a core part of that is going to be improving data integration,” says Harriet Durnford Smith, CMO at Adverity.
“After endless discussions around accelerated digital development, marketers know customer journeys have moved even further away from the 120-year-old sales funnel.”
“Understanding that audiences now engage with brands anywhere, at any time, forward-thinking players are embracing the flywheel model, which focuses on delivering marketing that makes customers happy and turns them into brand champions who help drive long-term business success.”
“This change is a big shift that hugely raises the stakes for experience quality."
"To effectively attract, engage and delight individuals, marketers must ensure every single interaction is informed by accurate, up-to-date insights about unique habits and tastes."
Harriet Durnford Smith, CMO, Adverity
“With our own research finding CMOs still feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data available and struggle to keep pace with complex customer behavior, it’s clear many lack the unified customer view they need.”
“Through 2023, we can expect to see more marketers doubling down on the key basics for powering Flywheel momentum, including ensuring their data management systems are well-connected and orchestrated to generate a constant flow of reliable, actionable data fuel.”
2. CMOs will focus on streamlining data foundations to avoid data stack disappointment
“As 2022 draws to a close, an unsettling forecast from Gartner states that 60% of CMOs will cut marketing analytics departments by half due to their inability to deliver expected improvements,” says Martin Brunthaler, CTO at Adverity.
“In the face of strong economic headwinds, slashing potential access to data-driven insights presents a flight risk to campaigns. Marketers will need the means to rapidly adjust their course and maintain altitude as turbulence hits, all of which is dependent on data and analytical capabilities."
“Moving into 2023, it will be important to overcome the challenges preventing marketers from unleashing the full value of available data and resources. Instead of onboarding different technologies in an attempted fix-all approach or even integrating more data, as Gartner also found organizations tend to do, marketers must switch their focus from adopting the latest shiny tool to refining what they already have.”
“Regardless of how sophisticated technologies become, the fundamentals of data orchestration haven’t changed; sorting, analyzing, linking, and visualizing data builds the runway for activation and informed marketing strategies."
Martin Brunthaler, CTO, Adverity
"By optimizing and streamlining these fundamental components, marketers will be able to ensure that analytics does indeed deliver on its promise to improve campaigns and ROI.”
3. More transparency will slowly lead to better personalization
“The new year will bring in a more open marketplace for advertisers in 2023,” says Mitesh Lakhani, Director of Solutions Consulting at Adverity.
“People have ever so slightly loosened their grip on their personal data and rather than blindly blocking everything, there is more of a selective acceptance of advertising if done in the right way. Consumers are learning and the days when Mark Zuckerburg is explaining what cookies are to the US Senate are not necessarily where the consumers live any longer.
"The rise in technological savviness among customers presents an opportunity for marketers.”
Mitesh Lakhani, Director of Solutions Consulting, Adverity
“I can see a more personalized approach from advertisers in 2023 due to the more open consumer head space. We see clearly how influence marketing plays a part in the purchase journey along with the increase in visual content, both of which open up that door to advertisers to curate content more carefully and tailor it to consumers.”
“There are companies out there already doing this to a high degree and considering the delay in the deprecation of third-party cookies from Google with reference to their Chrome browser this might well be the last 12-18 months until the whole digital advertising space needs to completely pivot their ideas to enable marketing and advertising success.”
4. Businesses will be shifting data strategies from reactive to proactive
“Looking at the past years it becomes clear that the amount of data marketers use keeps growing and that will not change in 2023,” says Stefan Januschke, Product Director at Adverity.
“Making good use of data in 2023 comes in multiple stages of maturity. The first step is the ability to look something up ad-hoc. How well are my campaigns performing across channels? Where do I have potential? Where should I stop investing?"
"Data maturity requires a clean and harmonized database that can be used by anyone in the organization.”
Stefan Januschke, Product Director, Adverity
“Second is the ability to answer these questions continuously without having to query your database each time. This may be through dashboards or other means of data access or visualization and requires mastering step one. Lastly, using the data directly to influence the success of your campaigns; keyword audience activation. For this, one needs to fully understand their data and the impact of using it.”
