With 2022 drawing to a close, your company may already be planning its digital marketing budget for 2023. During this process, a few questions are typically asked. Where should you put your focus? Which trends will carry over into the new year, and which ones will fall flat? The aim, of course, is to find the most cost-effective ways to get results.
In this post, we’re using a little bit of analysis using data from the past year to offer some guidance in how you can structure your 2023 digital marketing budget, especially when it comes to content marketing and social advertising. Regardless of what your KPIs are, we believe you can leverage these insights to make more informed decisions about where your money is spent.
Content Marketing Continues To Provide an Amazing Return
Traditional advertising is often very expensive and poorly targeted. Thankfully, more and more companies are catching on and are opting for more effective solutions. The rapid growth of content marketing over the past decade-plus proves this out.
Content marketing is about creating the exact right material for the exact right customer you hope to win. It’s about developing blog posts, videos, ebooks, white papers and more to reach these ideal clients during every stage of their buying journey, guiding them along until they’re finally ready to purchase your product or service.
When content marketing is given the time, effort and budget to succeed, it usually does — to the tune of a 62 percent reduction in cost and three times as many leads when compared to traditional marketing. If you aren’t funding content marketing inside your company, you should start. Make it a big part of your 2023 digital marketing budget and, odds are, you won’t be disappointed with the results.
LinkedIn Reigns Supreme for B2B Reach
Once called “the boring social network” by TechCrunch, LinkedIn has found its footing over the last few years, becoming a much more active and interesting destination for career-minded individuals. It’s now the place where major news is broken, business thought leaders are anointed, professional relationships are forged, and the right contact at the right company is just a few clicks away.
If ever there was a paradise for B2B companies in terms of reaching other businesses, it is LinkedIn. That’ll likely remain true for some time, so you should structure your digital marketing budget accordingly. That means devoting more funds to the creation and management of LinkedIn Ads, which are expected to account for 25 percent of B2B ad spend in the U.S. by 2024. You should also allocate resources to growing your company’s LinkedIn page, as well as using tools like Sales Navigator to locate and send introductions/messages to your ideal prospects. As the Content Marketing Institute notes, LinkedIn ranks as the social platform B2B content marketers find most effective.
TikTok May Also Be Worth a Look
Some view TikTok as a Gen Z fad that’ll fade out with time. After all, plenty of other social apps have come and gone in the past. Who’s to say TikTok has staying power, or that it’s even appropriate for “older” business audiences?
We can’t say for certain if TikTok will last. But here are some stats that might interest you.
First, TikTok is actually well ahead of some other platforms you may already use or have considered using. TikTok has left Twitter in the dust at this stage, with over one billion monthly active users to Twitter’s 436 million (as of January 2022). It also has quite a leg up on Reddit, which sits at roughly 430 monthly active users.
Next, the demographics of TikTok might come as a total surprise to you. In 2021, 36 percent of TikTok’s user base was made up of adults between the ages of 35 and 54. When you consider TikTok’s one billion users, suddenly you’re looking at a more mature, potentially business-minded audience of 360 million people. That’s a pretty tough crowd to ignore.
You don’t have to dive head-first into TikTok and designate a substantial amount of your digital marketing budget to producing short-form videos. But given its size and its continued growth, it’s reached the point where it’s worth some experimentation.
Twitter Could Be a Risky Place for Your Ad Dollars
Since going private after Elon’s purchase of the company in late October 2022, Twitter has been in a state of chaos. Many Twitter employees, including engineers who served in critical roles, have been let go or have resigned. New features have been created and decommissioned at breakneck speed. Content moderation policies and account suspension/reactivation decisions have largely been dictated by Mr. Musk himself. Musk has even talked about bankruptcy — less than a month into his ownership of the company — as a way to potentially solve some of Twitter’s financial woes, largely created by debt and an advertiser exodus from the platform.
There’s no telling what 2023 holds for Twitter. If you already have an established presence on the channel, continuing to post while playing things by ear seems like a reasonable strategy. As far as advertising spend is concerned, however, it is tough to recommend allocating any slice of your digital marketing budget to Twitter Ads. With other advertisers pausing their activity and users looking for alternative social networks to use, your money is likely better spent on a platform that is more predictable, reliable and will for certain exist by the time 2024 comes around.
Companies Are Also Spending Less on Facebook Ads
Apple giveth and Apple take it away. On the one hand, you can credit the storied Cupertino company with igniting the smartphone revolution that’s led to so much growth for countless other businesses. On the other hand, Apple’s decision to let users opt out of tracking by apps did significant harm to mobile advertising — especially where Facebook is concerned.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature has made Facebook mobile ads, which relied heavily on various tracking methods, much less reliable and much less performant as a result. The current economic climate, as well, has led many companies to watch their ad dollars a little more closely. Those two factors combined to hand Facebook a revenue drop of 4 percent in the period between July and Sept. 2022.
Until Facebook can get its ad situation sorted out and you can be more confident in how ads there perform, you might want to move digital ad spend away from that platform and toward something a bit more steady. LinkedIn might be a suitable alternative.
Trust HexaGroup With Your Digital Marketing Budget
Now that you have a better idea of how you can structure your 2023 digital marketing budget, it’s time to hire the digital marketing agency that’ll put your plans into motion. Contact us today for help with all digital marketing services, including SEO, advertising, social media and more.
