Invest in the Mobile Experience

Heading into 2023, users are tied to their smartphones more than ever, and your e-commerce site needs to be easy to find and intuitive to use on a phone, wherever your customers happen to be when they search. Visual search is increasingly popular, especially among younger users, with many customers likely to use the images results on search to find the product that they want – and increasingly likely to make their purchases from their phones. High-quality, attractive product images with accurate alt-text and content with great SEO will help your site rise to the top of the rankings. Once customers have found your business, it’s important to ensure your site has quick load times and a smooth user experience (UX) on mobile.

Use Customer Feedback to Develop Content

You may not realize it, but when it comes to content creation, you already have a wealth of information available to inform your digital marketing strategy. Look to product reviews, customer feedback, and email campaigns to discover what information your current customers wish they had about your product and business and develop thoughtful, search engine-optimized answers to those questions. Your current customers will thank you and your prospective ones will find you more easily as your content helps your business rise to the top of search results.

Create Content for Multichannel

As you plan your content strategy for 2023, keep in mind the many channels with which your potential customers engage. Whether they find your brand through a search for a specific product, through a post or ad on social media, through reading a review, or directly on your site, customers are likely to research across channels to inform their decision to purchase a product. As they circle through exploration and evaluation (also known to marketers as the “messy middle” of the typical sales funnel), relevant content for every point in the funnel, with actionable next steps, will keep customers moving toward conversion. 

This doesn’t mean you need to create unique content for each phase. With Google’s August 2022 Helpful Content Update, search is becoming more focused on prioritizing human-first content over search-engine-first content. Use the same core content idea and adapt it for different media, from blog posts to videos to infographics, that work well for various channels. Exploring the same key topic from different angles can offer meaningful information for your target audience. 

Enhance Your Social Media Strategy

The social media landscape – and social media advertising – may be undergoing changes, but it’s as important as ever to meet your customers where they are by creating an engaging and seamless social commerce experience that makes it easy for users to convert to a sale. What does that mean for your business?

• Prioritize short-form video. Whether we’re talking TikTok or Reels on Instagram and Facebook, audiences are turning to short-form video not only for entertainment but also for information – and that includes organic and paid ads. Users spend five times longer looking at a video ad than a static one, and Facebook video ads on average have a lower CPC at $1.86. 
• Create engaging, native-feeling ads. It’s not enough to just put out a quick video and hope for the best. Users prefer native ads that don’t break the flow of their experience of their feeds and instead seem like organic content. Your business can take this one step further by creating authentic, immersive, and interactive augmented reality ads. These ads instruct users who click on them on how to interact with the ad and offer users an opportunity to experience your product or service. 
• Optimize for AI recommendations. TikTok has created user expectations for relevant AI-selected content based on their in-app habits. In 2023, we expect that AI-recommended posts will infiltrate Facebook feeds, and the push for more content from Pages and people that you don’t follow will give Facebook a much-needed boost. 
• Engage with customers via DMs. Brand engagement via direct messages continues to rise, and Meta is looking to feature more tools to help brands tap into this shift. Meta recently highlighted the growth in Click-To-Message ads across Messenger and WhatsApp. In 2023, marketers should expect additional ad options that align with this new form of engagement.

Take Advantage of Trends…. 

NetElixir’s trend researchers have a few ideas of what design trends we can expect in 2023:

• The retro trend will continue strong, so if it suits your brand, consider using subtle cues to the 90s and other relevant decades in your designs, including colors and fonts. 
• We’re seeing more use of realistic-looking photography that doesn’t look overproduced, as it helps brands connect with their customers on a human level. 
• Gradients will still be big in 2023, with liquid-looking gradients adding another level to this visually appealing style.
• Tap into the coming metaverse by adopting or creating the sci-fi-augmented, futuristic reality feel that comes with avatars.
• Grab attention with cinemagraphs, still photographs stitched together as a video clip or animated GIF to show very subtle movement.

…But Stay True to Your Brand

From design to strategy, brand authenticity is important to your customers. If your brand tone relates to a current trend, do make the most of it – but don’t force it. Your brand will draw attention by presenting a consistent identity that customers connect with and remember.

Leading with your brand’s values and staying true to them will continue to position your business for success. In 2022, companies like United Airlines, Keystone Light, and Miller Lite tapped into their identities and values to promote on-topic messaging that draws attention to their brand: remember UA’s commitment to carbon neutrality and other environmentally-friendly stances, Keystone Light’s focus on their rural customers’ sense of community and self-sufficiency, and Miller Lite’s emphasis on Americana. In 2023, consider how your brand can explore its own values in ways that capture the interest of potential customers. 

Work with NetElixir

Whatever your plans for 2023, NetElixir can help your business develop a digital marketing strategy that will resonate with current customers and connect with new ones. From web development to prepare for the cookieless future and make your e-commerce site more mobile-friendly, to SEO and thoughtful content creation, to engagement with trends, NetElixir’s team of experts will work with you to frame a strategy for success in the new year and beyond.  

Additional Resources

• Crafting an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy
• How to Optimize Your Website With The Latest Digital Marketing Trends
• Recent Changes In Google Search Console

The post NetElixir’s Insights and Trends for 2023 appeared first on NetElixir.

Although virtual meetings don’t hold the same resonance and contact as in person meetings, we were no longer bound by the constraints of location and timing; we could chat with someone across the globe, pop in to webinars on a myriad of topics, and connect with people we may not have ever ran into. At NetElixir, we used the new virtual medium to bring together retail and academic thought-leaders in a greater capacity than ever in our 16 years. We got to hear from marketing legends Jerry Wind and George Day, business innovators Anindya Ghose and Sheena Iyengar, global strategists Matt Guffey and Bob Dillon, and retail executives Al Bessin, Carlo Savino, Parag Shah, and Ajit Sivadasan.

As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots looking backward. So, NetElixir has compiled our top twelve ‘dots’ of inspiration from our speakers throughout the year to bring you the Gift of Knowledge in our new initiative 12 Days of Empathy. Insights. Innovation. These gifts are in the form of short, digestible video clips that will be delivered straight to your inbox starting on December 25th. 

As we consider what the future will bring in terms of digital marketing and eCommerce, we need to reflect on what we have learned and endured throughout 2020. 

Some tenets that will most likely carry into the new year and beyond:

• Nimbleness and agility is crucial in order to seize opportunities as they arise in order to meet customers where they are. Continual innovation and experimentation is key to maintaining this agility and trying something new. 
• Data is the backbone of decision making. Having the latest real-time data will help guide your brand so you won’t rely on assumptions. Gather as much customer intelligence as you can and learn about industry trends and benchmarks in order to stay ahead.
• The new online shopping experience is mobile first, immersive, and responsive. The future is digital.

Keeping up with the digital future requires empathy, insights, and innovation. Inspiration comes in many forms – or in many gifts. One idea can change the future.

The post The Gift of Knowledge appeared first on NetElixir.

Robin Dreeke, former FBI Special Agent and Behavioral Analyst, founded People Formula, LLC to help people build lasting relationships and predict who can be trusted. Using his experience as a Behavioral Analyst for the FBI to recruit new spies, Dreeke shares his formula for behavior prediction with NetElixir. Creating lasting and trusting relationships is important now more than ever, as we will overcome the challenges of this year together.

Behavior Prediction

Dreeke’s formula is not about predicting trust, but predicting behavior. At the core of healthy relationships is predicting the other person’s behavior. Often, we’re already doing this subconsciously as we get to know people better and recognize their patterns of behavior. 

Humans are bonded in our goals to achieve security, prosperity, and wellness – but these all take different forms for each of us. Understanding the unique motivations each individual has to achieve security, prosperity, and wellness will give you a deeper comprehension about their future behaviors.

As Dreeke performed about 90-100 personality assessments each year during his recruitment years, he began to write down his process of strategizing trust to turn it into his book on Sizing People Up. The strategies noted were used both in Dreeke’s personal and professional life, as building strong relationships is crucial in all facets of our lives. At the heart of his strategy is to make it about the other person you are trying to connect with. 

Sharing security, prosperity, and wellness with one another is a simple human craving. We affiliate ourselves with meaningful groups, organizations, and families that fulfill these needs for us and share our values. We can demonstrate commitment to other another – employees, family members, business partners, etc. – by seeking their thoughts and opinions, talking in terms of each individual’s priorities, validating those priorities and contexts, and empowering them with choice. Simply put, make it about them.

Making it About Them

Dreeke says that 40% of our day is sharing our thoughts and opinions with others. In doing so, we are testing the world around us for acceptance. Upon receiving that acceptance, our brains release dopamine and fire up our pleasure senses. By engaging in conversations about the other person, you are getting their brain to reward them for spending time with you. The key to this, however, is truthful and transparent engagement. Engaging with someone and learning about them only to manipulate them down the road will not yield successful, trusting, and long-lasting relationships. 

Discovering someone else’s priorities and goals allows you to become an available resource in helping people achieve their dreams – and that is the key to lasting, trusting, and successful relationships. Be helpful and a go giver (two tenets key to NetElixir’s identity).

“The world became an easier place,” Dreeke says in reflection of his decision to help others achieve their goals with no expectation of reciprocity. With an expectation of reciprocity, the relationship skews back to you and then it is no longer about the other person.

People are easy to predict if you know and deeply understand their definition of security, prosperity, and wellness.

“This is not about manipulation, this is not about trickery, this is about understanding people at a core level, deep as you possibly can,” Dreeke says.

If you understand a person, then you can manage your expectations about them. You won’t set the bar too high and then grow angry or resentful when the other person does not meet your standard; negative emotions badly impact relationships. An appropriate level of expectation allows the other party to meet or exceed it. And if they do happen to fall short, Dreeke explains, then you have taken the time to understand them and you know something must have happened that hindered their performance. Knowing what you know, you can be a resource to them.

Signs Someone is Trustworthy

Predicting behavior = rational cognitive thoughts + observations

Intuition = liking + gut feelings

Predicting behavior is not intuition. We often want to trust people we like, but likeability rests on similar morals, ethics, beliefs, backgrounds, and interests, which turns into confirmation bias on trustworthiness. Same goes for disliking someone, as we assume we cannot trust someone we do not like. However, trust is about predictable behavior; through observing someone, we can reasonably predict what they would do in the next situation. Dreeke takes us through six signs to use in predicting behavior.

Vesting

They are as invested in you as you are in them. Through their actions, deeds, and words, the other person is demonstrating that they are invested in your success as much as their own. By investing in you, they adjust to you, call in favors for you (leveraging their strong relationships with others), and share deep secrets with you.

Longevity

People display signs of committing to a lasting relationship when they ask you to participate in long-term goals with them. They also typically say we instead of you or I, signaling they see you as part of their team. Pay attention to traditions and inclusions, as those also signal commitment.

Reliability

Reliability showcases competence and diligence. Reliable people speak with specifics, accept responsibility, are transparent with their shortcomings, and demonstrate an ability to use the skills they speak on. Reliable people don’t have to be well-rounded; if they are competent in one lane, use them there. Allow people to be self-aware of their own shortcomings and capitalize on how their strengths will be advantageous. 

Actions

Actions illustrate past patterns of key behaviors. Trustworthy people fulfill requests quickly, live up to their obligations, and do not change their version of events when questioned. Again, they show self-awareness and can speak on why they act how they do. These people are accurate and consistent.

Language

How someone speaks to you reveals insights into their trustworthiness. People who seek your thoughts and opinions, speak in terms of your priorities, validate you, and empower you with choices can be trusted. Why? Because they are using the same criteria you use to be a resource to them.

Stability

Stable people are hard to scare, impeccably rational, and happy with themselves. In times of stress, view how well they hold themselves together and respond. Obviously, people do respond to stress immediately, but note how quickly they compose themselves and return to center to consider how stable they are and will be in the future.

Dreeke summarizes that someone does not need to hit all these criteria in order to be trusted; use your own judgement in cases where people display high proficiency in one or two areas.

Key Takeaways

1. Trust and healthy relationships are the key to moving forward with any objective.
2. Demonstrating affiliation and value to others is the key to those relationships.
3. Sizing People Up is about predicting behavior for deeper understanding.
4. Each sign is important, but not absolute.

More Readings

• Innovation Workshop on Think Bigger: How to Actually Think Out of the Box
• How Vigilant Organizations Gain an Edge
• Opportunities in Times of Crisis

The post Building Trust and Sizing People Up appeared first on NetElixir.