The start of a new year is seen as bringing new operational efficiencies, stronger strategies, a far greater emphasis on building deep ties with various stakeholders and consumers. In line with the current market ecosystem, technology and a human approach are seen to go hand in hand.
As 2023 kicks off, Adgully has reached out to key industry leaders to Crystal Gaze into 2023, as part of our annual Trending now series, to highlight the major trends and developments that they see dominating the industry in the coming year.
Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Just Dialtalks about how digital marketing is increasingly becoming the primary marketing lever, driven by data penetration and usage as well as the overall macroeconomic challenges.
Key Trends Dominating Digital in 2023
As we move into 2023 and beyond, the digital adoption and push is likely to only strengthen further. This will have implications for the marketing strategy, which is likely to become even more ROI-driven. As a result, digital marketing is likely to get maximum budget allocation. Marketers will increasingly be responsible for growing direct digital revenue streams, and therefore marketing will impact business results more. In the absence of new major external shocks, consumer demand is likely to continue to be strong.
Great expectations
We expect consumer demand to remain strong without new macroeconomic disturbances. Overall search trends at the national as well as hyperlocal level are expected to show robust growth.
Customers, including SMEs and individuals, are expected to chase growth and invest aggressively for it. Digitization of SME ecosystems will gain further momentum and will lead to improved efficiency and greater opportunities. More consumers will do more things online, leading to the expansion of the digital economy.
Key focus areas for Just Dial in 2023
In the past year, we have carried out extensive consumer outreach campaigns via various digital marketing channels. Our performance marketing initiatives received a significant boost along with increased intensity of social media campaigns. We also built a lot of brand traction by using PR to see data-centric stories across different categories. We had several improvements that led to a better consumer experience across our platforms.
We will continue to strengthen our core value proposition with better products and services that deliver superior customer experience.
Rewind 2022
The year 2022 was good through its share of challenges and opportunities. The company’s recovery after the last Covid wave has been strong across categories. We experienced a significant increase in search traffic and related activities.
CMOs are increasingly looking at transactions and revenue as core metrics and using tools to directly drive them. This brings digital marketing to the forefront in a data first world from acquiring customers to retaining and building lifetime value with them. With more developments around analytics, AI, Metaverse, etc., we can only expect digital marketing to become the core driver of all marketing KPIs.
All wings of digital marketing be it performance or social media or emails or influencer etc. have evolved rapidly due to data pool and data strategy initiatives. These add significant value to business results directly and are no longer limited to driving brand or marketing KPIs. This brings them directly into boardroom discussions and thus part of the overall business strategy itself.
Main trends and developments in 2022
Some of the key trends observed were increased digital adoption across categories and players, strong consumer satisfaction following the Omicron wave, growth-oriented campaigns by clients including SMEs and service providers, marketing dollars shifting to more ROI-driven media and activities, etc.
