After wrapping up 2022, we at Harrison Carloss are reflecting on a positive year of growth with many client wins, staff milestones and life events worth celebrating. It was also our 50th year in business! We have also had another year of eyebrow raising external events which have certainly kept us all on our toes!

It’s that time of year when put the past year to bed and we risk a gaze into our crystal ball (actually a half empty bottle of Perrier Jouet) to come up with a trend predictions for 2023 across our four core services; web development, digital marketing, creative and strategy.

Web Development

Development by name, development by nature. Web development trends can change like the wind with the constant development of new and exciting technologies coming through the market. We think the next big thing we will see brands adopting is development of more experiential websites.

These websites can create an experience of interacting with the products or services through storytelling and interactive design. (By letting you try stuff on or see how new furniture would look in your rooms.) And that’s only the beginning.

What we’re really talking about here are wholly immersive web experiences designed to engage and involve an audience on a deeper and more personal level – think online games – rather than just clunky flat content pages.

Experiential websites mightn’t even have your typical navigational features like menus and homepages; they can use parallax, 3D content, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), or artificial intelligence (AI) to bring a website to life as ‘a sensory adventure’.

Early adopters have already jumped on this trend… will you be next in line on this next big thing?

Digital Marketing

We predict that SEO will be the digital channel of choice for 2023. SEO can be very competitive, a trait it shares with PPC because of the big difference they can make to your website traffic. But during a recession SEO may seems like an easy expense to cut, and so tends to be the first digital channel to get the chop when budgets are squeezed.

We think that could be a big mistake. A recession is just the time to be upping your SEO effort. SEO can alleviate direct cost channels (such as paid) and offer long-term benefits and short-term stability. So while everyone else is cutting, we predict that brands that continue to evolve their SEO strategy in a recession will come out ahead.

“Businesses relied on web searches during COVID. Now, they’re using SEO to build a strong foundation and keep that momentum going to help them prepare for the challenges ahead.” explains Loren Baker, founder and owner of Search Engine Journal.

Creative and design

Now slow down, put your feet up and dust off your reading glasses – long form ad copy could be making a comeback into campaign concepts! (And not before time some might say.)

Are there really signs that attention spans are getting longer than the fabled 3 seconds? Did the pandemic really have the effect of endowing us with a greater capacity to digest content?

Naturally many die-hard marketers will always swear that nobody has time to read ads with long copy. Yet while there have always been advocates of both styles, it should be platform specific and depend on your message and your audience.

Obviously, there are cases when a few shouty words of copy just wouldn’t work. The same goes for reams of long copy but with that said we predict we will start to see more storytelling creative concepts from brands in the form of ads with long copy throughout 2023.

One thing’s for sure though. Whether your visuals have long or short form copy, having something relevant and engaging to say has to be what matters.

Strategy

We are all aware that we are entering into a tough economic climate next year. And in such a climate, the traditional knee jerk reaction is for marketing budgets to be cut.

Yet according to a great deal of research, this short-term view often turns out to be a mistake in the long term. What people should be doing instead is the exact opposite by following Coca Cola’s example and putting more budget behind their marketing.

The drinks giant has announced that their strategy for next year will be to significantly increase their marketing spend. As a result of this approach to what will be a challenging 2023, the company has already seen revenues grow, and reckons this is the only way to maintain the ‘long-term health of the business’, their CEO James Quincey has said.

The message is that marketing spend is not a cost, it’s an investment. Something that businesses of all sizes can adopt.

Have a marketing project you’d like some help with? We’re all ears. Speak to one of the team and see how we can support your 2023 marketing plans – including web development, digital marketing, creative and strategy.