20 Marketing Predictions for 2023 (That Don’t Suck)

‍1. Marketing moves away from “growth at all costs” to an efficiency model. 

• This is not really a prediction, it’s a fact, which is important pre-context for my marketing predictions. 
• Marketing teams won’t get “more budget” in 2023, but rather — they’ll need to make existing budgets drive significantly better ROI.
• Given the necessity to course-correct after years of fiscal irresponsibility, B2B companies are rethinking their customer acquisition / growth strategy for 2023. 
• Cognism’s CMO, Alice de Courcy, says there are tons of ways to optimize marketing programs and improve performance without huge amounts of spending. 

2. Customer marketing, retention and churn reduction becomes a top priority for B2B companies. 

• For years, B2B companies have had an unhealthy fixation on demand gen.
• We will see a massive shift to lifecycle marketing, advocacy and value creation for customers — leading to upsell / cross-sell / referral based growth. 

3. Marketing through people - community, influencer marketing, affiliates will rise significantly.

• Relevance is a problem for B2B marketing - however, marketing through people solves it. 
• Trust is another problem for B2B marketing - also solved by marketing through people.  
• The decay of targeting capabilities - also solved by marketing through people. 

4. Product & data integrations + strategic partnerships will become a key growth lever. 

• There are thousands of data sources, API endpoints, and systems (think ERP and CRM) that customers want to integrate together. 
• If you don’t offer a path to data integration with other tools, you’re providing a sub-par customer experience which inherently leads to customer dissatisfaction, risk of churn, etc. 
• For example, Chili Piper integrates with nearly 100 other platforms. This is critical for their business growth. 
• If you can tap into “ecosystem marketing” — think Aircall, Zendesk, Freshworks, Zapier, Segment and many others — it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

5. CMOs play it safe in 2023: shifting from offense to defense. 

• Forrester came out with this prediction, and I actually agree with it. 
• However, I disagree with Forrester’s prediction that CMOs will reallocate budget to performance marketing and additional MarTech. 
• Key takeaway: CMOs will be reluctant to take “big swings” on large-scale conferences, expensive bets, big brand activations, new tech, and potentially wasteful campaigns.

6. Marketing teams significantly reduce / consolidate their tech stacks.

• Think about it — platform companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, Zendesk, 6Sense, Chili Piper, etc. are more like a central nervous system — because they’re stickier platforms, it’s unlikely they’ll be replaced. 
• To that end, companies will look to ditch their single point solutions in favor of using the all-in-one “bundle”, even if it means operating with an inferior feature set. 
• Key takeaway: if HubSpot or other “nucleus” style marketing platforms can offer what your product does for significantly less cost (or even free) — you’re in trouble.

7. Declared Intent > Assumed Intent.

• This is already happening, but we’ll continue weening ourselves off the dreaded MQL hamster wheel. 
• That means a very distinct shift from lead gen to demand gen. 
• Generating contact info of uninterested buyers (MQLs) so SDRs can annoy them with spam will be replaced by marketing-sourced, legitimate website demo requests.
• Marketing & sales teams will be aligned once and for all — by revisiting all conversion points across the website, and determining how to treat each conversion activity. 
• LinkedIn lead gen, content syndication lead gen, webinar lead gen, etc. — all die as a result of properly filtering declared intent sources vs. assumed intent sources. 
• B2B contact databases will serve more a data enrichment, ABM support function rather than supplying SDRs with lists of cold contacts to spam. 

8. Paid search experiences cutbacks > budget shifts to affiliates, influencers and organic. 

• We’ve all seen headlines like AirBnB shifting investment from paid search to brand marketing. 
• Companies are slashing paid search by greater than 50% and seeing no changes to their marketing outcomes.
• Most teams struggle to calculate which ad campaigns acquire their best customers, and fail to attribute profitability to their paid search campaigns.
• Key takeaway: CMOs will shift performance marketing budgets to higher efficiency channels.

9. Greater investment in SEO. 

• Because “go-to” advertising channels are reaching a point of diminishing returns for brands who want to grow - SEO is primed to flourish next year. 
• As advertising costs increase, and targeting capabilities decay — investment in “easy to rank” keywords and organic content is a logical defense mechanism. 
• With that, companies will care less about “traffic growth” and much more about capturing all of the SEO gold which exists in the extreme long tail near the bottom of funnel. 
• With the release of Google’s “helpful content” algorithm update, it makes sense that companies prioritize creating content experiences that provide immense value to those researching their products and services. 

10. Product tours become normalized. 

• They’re not yet ready to speak with sales, but they’re interested in seeing how the product works. What’s the middle-ground solution? 
• Enter product tours. Companies like Tourial are well positioned to disrupt the product led growth space in a big way. 
• This doesn’t make salespeople less important — it makes them more relevant.

11. Display ads for B2B die once and for all. 

• Ad fatigue is running rampant. Most B2B display ads get ignored today. 
• B2B marketers are realizing that most display traffic is cheap, junk clicks — I expect to see a significant reduction in these programs. 
• However, I do believe YouTube pre-roll advertising will continue to persist as a viable alternative to display ads, given that video storytelling may help to create a long lasting positive brand impression that resonates with buyers over time. 

12. Cold outbound suffers greatly across the board. 

• Companies are realizing that most cold outbound techniques are really not sales — but rather, outbound marketing. 
• Why? Because most sales development turns off B2B buyers and prematurely pushes low-quality, out of market leads to sales — generating fewer qualified leads.
• Companies like Gated are making it easier to block sales emails and ignore unwanted solicitations. 
• Companies like RoboKiller are blocking telemarketers from harassing people with spam calls. 
• Companies like Optery are enabling consumers to remove their personal information from the internet — including data broker indexes. 
• Cognism reported that out of 100 cold calls, only 2 will develop into a qualified lead. 
• To the point of declining cold call efficiency, look at this post from Mutiny’s CEO — she’s getting spammed at least 5x per day by cold callers. 

13. The Great Resignation becomes The Great Regret.

• Tech layoffs dominate the headlines, and we’ll see this trend continue throughout 2023. 
• “Revenue growth is not in line with the number of employees anymore” - source, Kevin Indig.
• As teams have become grossly over-bloated, not only will layoffs continue, but salaries will normalize and hiring freezes will persist. 
• Key takeaway: 2023 will be a very bad year for job seekers. 
• On a positive note: we’ll see the rise of “super performers” — people who work in tech with two full-time remote jobs, squeezed into a 40 hour work week. 

14. Utilization of agencies, consultants and fractional VPs / CMOs will rise dramatically.

• Given the need to slash headcount, companies will replace FT employees with specialized freelance marketers — with fewer complications and no strings attached. 
• Companies love the idea of more contractors and less headcount — it means not having to pay for healthcare, benefits and other overhead costs, while enjoying the upside of highly skilled marketers — who quite frankly, don’t want to work in-house anyway. 
• The top 10% of marketers realize they can maximize their earning potential by ditching the W2 for a W9 — so they are operating like CEOs instead of employees. 

15. Companies desperately need to improve sales pipeline conversion rates in 2023. 

• Rather than “more top of funnel” Keenan argues that companies need to increase win rates.
• I agree with Keenan, that sales cycle management — pipeline to closed/won % — will be a top priority for sales teams in 2023.

16. Similarly, marketing teams desperately need to improve website conversion rates in 2023. 

• Peep Laja surveyed over 100 tech CMOs and learned they plan to increase their investment in website optimization next year. 
• CMOs want to run more growth experiments while prioritizing higher impact experiments — it’s clear that conversion rate optimization will be a huge focus for marketing teams. 

17. Message testing becomes more widespread. 

• Companies like Wynter are disrupting the way companies do messaging and positioning. 
• Smart B2B companies will fix their jargon-loaded, fluffy, generic headlines and baseless value props in exchange for specific, useful, clear website copy. 
• Overly aspirational messaging is often driven by internal delusion and disconnect from customer reality. 

18. Large-scale conference investments get slashed.

• I really don’t see companies justifying 50k (and up) conference investments during an economic downturn. Not to mention all the travel and overhead costs. 
• Virtual platform companies like Accelevents are well positioned to thrive given the urgency to cut costs on in-person conferences — inherently increasing the demand for online experiences. 
• However, I still believe smaller, more focused in-person events can be highly valuable and worth the investment. 
• The bottom line: a mix of virtual conferences and smaller in-person events will get more executive buy-in than large scale industry trade shows. 

19. Video is the future of B2B marketing.

• I saw a great tweet about this, and I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with something so much. 
• Consider ad fatigue and the death of display ads — video is the most logical replacement. 
• I also predict we are going to see more B2B companies experimenting with short form video — particularly on LinkedIn and YouTube, as a powerful storytelling medium. 
• With regard to SEO, video is the best way to stand out in a world of sameness, copycat content marketing and cluttered search results. 

20. Newsletters are making a comeback. 

• With the rise of platforms like Substack and Beehiiv, it’s never been easier to build a captive audience and keep them engaged with newsletter marketing. 
• Over recent years, B2B brands damaged the perception of newsletters due to awful content flows, lack of relevance, lack of personality, and lack of value. 
• Today, we’re observing a resurgence of newsletters at the individual content creator level. ‍
• No niche is ever too crowded for fresh thinking — therefore, top content creators with something interesting to say can grow an audience in their respective industries, and people will actually pay attention.