Digital trends 2023

As we enter the new year, it is important to stay updated on the latest digital trends that will shape our industry and the way people live and work. In this article, experts within the NOVA group share the most important insights for 2023, in the areas of SEO, branding, total experience, e-commerce, web development, and marketing automation. From the importance of personalization in the customer journey to the rise of artificial intelligence, these insights can help our clients stay ahead in the ever-changing digital landscape. Let's see what our experts have to say about the digital year 2023:

Top three biggest e-commerce trends from Cloud Nine:

1. AI makes its entry into e-commerce and provides us with better and more relevant product searches, personalized product recommendations based on previous behavior, and better customer service for simpler questions such as product facts, stock and delivery status, and more with the help of automated chatbots. AI will also be used for optimization of purchasing, delivery, and inventory management.

2. Composable commerce, i.e., modular e-commerce solutions with headless technology, are becoming increasingly popular and offer great opportunities for unique, industry-adapted e-commerce experiences. In a composable commerce solution, parts can be replaced or upgraded without affecting the entire platform.

3. Sustainability and traceability are becoming increasingly important for consumers, and therefore, e-commerce with used goods and second-hand fashion is growing. E-retailers are also investing in reducing the number of returns through better product information, size descriptions, and other measures.

Do you want to know more about e-commerce trends? Listen to Cloud Nine's trend forecast on January 18th! Register here

Top 3 biggest trends in digital marketing from Pineberry:

Social media

Interest-driven algorithms that will start being used more instead of relationship-driven algorithms. TikTok is based on this, and Meta is also shifting over. This means that it is becoming increasingly important to create good, engaging content and have a good content strategy that appeals to the target audience you want to reach. Accounts are not as dependent on the number of followers to reach many, which means that publishers and advertisers must be quick and keep up with trends to be visible on social media.

Paid search

The cookie death will continue in 2023 and Google's decision to stop supporting third-party cookies will affect all companies working online and digitally with marketing. Among other things, it will become more difficult and complex to track users and conversions to tailor marketing based on visitors' browsing habits.

The way around this is, of course, a good consent management platform that gives visitors the opportunity to give informed consent to cookies and with the help of Google's consent mode, one should be able to obtain good decision-making data in the form of modeled data in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 if there is enough traffic.

Consent mode works by taking data from users who have accepted cookies and then applying their data to users who have rejected. In this way, modeled tracking data can be generated, even for those who have rejected. Without setting cookies on users!

SEO

Various AI solutions have been refined and reached the masses recently, Open AI's ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 are two examples. Using AI to streamline content creation, translations, and idea generation will become a major trend in 2023. Here it will be important for companies to learn to handle AI correctly and understand its possibilities and limitations. Many will experiment with this in 2023.

Google views this trend with concern as the internet risks being flooded with AI-generated content that does not always maintain the highest quality. We can expect Google to take measures to ensure quality in the search results.

Top 3 trends in user experience 2023 from Fyr Agency:

1. More and more brands have realized that you cannot separate customer, user, and employee experience into different silos if you want to create an exceptional overall experience. The total experience delivered has a huge impact when it comes to creating increased profitability and gaining love and loyalty from customers and employees. In 2023, we will see a shift towards actively working more holistically and incorporating all perspectives in the design process, which will distinguish good brands from great brands moving forward.

2. The product vision is becoming increasingly important to anchor the experiences you want to create today, but it is often missing in the organization. Lift your gaze from the projects and legacy challenges you are grappling with and set up a visualized journey, without aiming so far ahead that it becomes science fiction. Three to five years ahead is reasonable. Sketch out how the product and your organization will make life easier for you and your customers and display it visibly on the wall or intranet. This is a living material, a guiding star, that should form the basis for everything you do today, from strategy to roadmap, backlog, and implementation.

3. EU directive goes from buzz to budget winner. During 2022, in every presentation about ux-copy, I mentioned ".. and soon this will become even more important .." and everyone nodded in agreement. I am, of course, talking about the EU Accessibility Directive that has become law. The buzz in meeting rooms grew exponentially last year and is now moving on to become a budget winner. One of the four basic principles is comprehensibility. Therefore, text work will get its well-deserved place from the start of the design process, and it will be easier to ensure that both text and design are indeed COMPREHENSIBLE to the user.

Top 3 brand trends from Singular Studios:

1. Continued focus on brand safety

In uncertain times, brands always need to act both quickly and resolutely to minimize negative effects, and in 2023 we will see continued strong focus on brand safety. The crises that followed each other during 2022 forced many brands to take a stand and act on their strategies and collaborations in various ways. The Ukraine war caused a mass exodus of brands from Russia, Elon Musk's decree about a new open Twitter made major advertisers freeze their purchases, and at home, the Margaux Dietz scandal caused several brands to break collaborations. We will likely see continued increasing demands on media platforms and influencers to manage brand safety, but also that brands create even clearer strategies with a balance of value-driven long-term collaborations/initiatives that should be able to survive most crises and more agile short-term initiatives with consciously higher risk.

2. Brand management through AI

AI will be on everyone's lips in 2023. We will continue to see the development of services that facilitate research, monitoring, design, and various types of content production with the help of AI. The positive aspect is that it will become increasingly easier for brand owners to effectively ensure basic brand consistency in appearance and content across more touchpoints in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. However, as automation and standardization of design and creative creation increase, uniformity will become even greater, which will likely increase the need for authenticity and make more complex differentiation critical for many brands, especially in experience-driven segments.

3. Elimination and innovation

Just like during all crises, we will likely see a number of brands go under and a number of new ones be born in 2023 and beyond. Brands that are not sufficiently clear, attractive, and affordable will have a tougher time as consumers and customers review their investments. We often see polarization where the middle segments, i.e., those that are neither premium nor low-priced, suffer because their positions are not sufficiently value-creating. But at the same time, new offerings will be created, categories will be redefined, and new brands, challenging with new solutions and new energy, will make an entrance. For that is the fine logic of crises: while we choose the safe and clear options, we are also willing to try what might be even smarter and better.

Top 3 martech trends 2023 from Infunnel:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to draw real conclusions about customer behavior and preferences based on third-party data. However, there is also great potential in activating the data we already have. 2023 is the year to get more business value from your sales and marketing systems;

1. Highlight, refine, and use your first-party data - By using and combining information from CRM, from forms on the website, or based on how the customer interacts with email communication, we can create sharper segments and increased personalization. All based on data that we can, and are allowed to, use.

2. Build a data model that everyone understands, whether they work in sales, marketing, or service. What do we want, can we, and should we save about our customers or leads? Data that can be used for segmentation, better information for the sales force & customer service, or to measure and follow up. Collect the data in one place, why not in a CDP?

3. Segment dynamically - it's time to stop treating everyone the same and start utilizing the aforementioned first-party data, using the data model as a basis for smart segments where data determines who is in which segment. And of course - to tailor content and experience along the customer journey.

Then automate a flow where email, sms, customer service calls, a chatbot, or an in-app message are combined to create relevant dialogues with customers and leads.

Top 3 web development trends from Epinova:

At Epinova, we experience three clear areas within web development and e-commerce where both we and our customers have driven a shift during 2022. A shift Linus Ekström, CEO at Epinova, predicts will increase even more in 2023.

1. The sharing economy is entering companies, and large and small organizations alike want to share costs and increase the pace of innovation through joint solutions. They want to work smarter with multi-sites and e-commerce and be able to scale solutions so that several own brands or websites share functionality. Reusability is a clear trend.

2. Orchestration of content is starting to gain serious momentum, which is necessary for companies dealing with complex system landscapes and many different systems to interact with. Content creation can be streamlined, and through effective content marketing, a proprietary component library, and a modern digital asset management (DAM), visitors are provided with a consistent user experience regardless of the channel. This can involve anything from booking flows, course registrations to loyalty systems and forms.

3. The level of maturity is increasingly rising in areas such as experimentation and optimization through data-driven decisions. Having ownership over your customer journey and gaining control over user-generated data allows it to be used for analysis, personalization, and experimentation - often driven by AI.

Strength in diversity

We look forward to an exciting year together with you, especially in April when all companies within Swedish NOVA move into new, fresh premises at Slussen in Stockholm.

NOVA Consulting Group's wide range is our strength as we enter 2023. As one of Sweden's fastest-growing agency groups, we have a mix of the best experts within the entire digital ecosystem. For our customers, this means the opportunity to choose from our wide range of services while allowing us to work agilely and dynamically between companies to create an efficient delivery with the customer's business in focus.