Consumers’ brand expectations and habits continue to change, spurring new marketing trends — requiring marketing communications pros to keep pace and evolve their strategies and tactics. SmartBrief asked a few marketing industry trade associations (and our publishing partners) what brand and agency marketing pros should know as we enter the final few months of 2022 and plan for 2023.
Latinos & Streaming
Horacio Gavilan, Executive Director, Hispanic Marketing Council
Latinos over-index on streaming, spending 254 billion minutes consuming content, because streaming provides more authentic and diverse storylines and casts than traditional television.
Culture and language are very tied together, and they’re important at different times. Therefore, for bilingual and bicultural segments, it’s important to understand what types of programming they want to consume in English and which ones they want to consume in Spanish. With the metadata that streaming platforms provide, marketers can understand the weight of culture and language by programming, key segments and key times. This technology can help create a better and more customized experience for each audience. For example, brands can offer digital exclusives, original branded content, shoppable ads and sponsored content collections that can amplify their messages.
It is critical that marketers partner with Hispanic marketing specialists to ensure they are delivering the right content to the right audience … and that their content is relevant and compelling.
Use data to drive DEI
Dr. Felicia Blow, APR, 2022 PRSA Chair
Diversity, equity and inclusion will continue to drive the conversation in 2023 with the importance affecting and influencing everything we do. This includes looking through a DEI lens that includes race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, culture, religion, mental and physical ability, class and immigration status. PR professionals must communicate in ways that reflect your DEI values and are authentic.
Microinfluencers also have begun to change everything. Marketing/PR is more niche, targeted, and specific. All the more reason it will be important to embrace DEI.
Meeting this challenge will require data. Communicators need to assess the data drivers that move your organization, including understanding the composition of your audiences and employees. Investments in training for yourself and others in your circle of influence will lead to better outcomes, as will having greater alignment of your DEI commitment across all layers of your organization.
Finally, measure your DEI efforts along with your communications/PR results.
Create a “composable enterprise”
Michael Berberich, senior director of ANA Marketing Futures
Marketers should educate themselves on the notion of a “composable enterprise,” which is essentially a decoupled, modular tech stack. Brands often are tied to one monolithic tech platform, which dictates marketing activations when it should be the other way around. With 10,000 companies in the marketing technology landscape, it’s very likely there’s a company that does exactly what you’re looking to achieve. Marketers can leverage the exploding API economy to deploy interoperable tech products, thereby reducing costs and time to market, while being able to return their focus to growing the business.
Many marketers already have experience in composability, even if they don’t realize it. If you ever created a digital activation that required you to go beyond IT’s back-end capabilities, you likely pitched the idea by focusing on the business goals you were trying to achieve. Building a composable enterprise doesn’t need to happen all at once; start with the biggest pain points and clearest business needs and go from there.
If history — especially in marketing — has taught us anything, it is that marketing trends change. While we must work with what we know, we must always be prepared to pivot. If you want to stay on top of the latest marketing trends and news, subscribe to SmartBrief on Social Business or any of the other free marketing and communications newsletters SmartBrief offers.
(NOTE: This story, originally published in December 2021, was updated August 2022.)
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