Today’s brands and agencies are under constant bombardment, having to factor new strategies, tactics, technologies and marketplace realities into their campaigns and planning cycles. This is especially true as we approach year’s end in a climate of global economic uncertainty, where marketers are looking to focus efforts to ensure their time and resources are going toward areas that will deliver the biggest bang for their buck in 2023 and beyond.

The good news is that regardless of what the macro-economic environment might hold in 2023, marketers still have the opportunity to take control of how they deliver positive results. So, what initiatives are worthy of marketers’ attention and energy going into the new year? Let’s take a look at some priority areas.

Budgeting for Flexibility

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that change is the only constant within the marketing landscape—and that the rate of change is only accelerating. This isn’t a reality to be feared, but rather embraced. In 2023, it’s time to put the lessons of recent years into action by building for more nimble and adaptive planning. While the annual budgeting process is always a necessity, marketers can increase their flexibility in 2023 by planning for monthly or quarterly budget reassessments to accommodate for any unexpected market shifts throughout the year.

As marketers move forward in an economically constrained environment, their ad spend is going to be subject to a greater level of scrutiny, with pressure to deliver quick results. Brands should turn their attention to highly measurable and data-driven channels where performance is well understood. Likewise, marketers will want to pay close attention to their channel mix to ensure they’re taking every opportunity to leverage results in one channel to bolster efforts in another.

Becoming Truly Omnichannel

Marketers know that they need to be everywhere their customers and prospects are, but creating that omnichannel reality is an area that requires constant focus. Going into 2023, marketers should be clear about where their current cross-channel efforts are working, where they need to be enhanced—and where current solutions might cease to apply. Brands need to be testing more channels to identify a mix that delivers measurable ROI, even in cookieless environments.

Today’s brands need to ensure their campaigns—regardless of the target demographic—are omnichannel. CTV, DOOH, addressable linear, and other emerging channels have become just as important as traditional web and mobile. But not enough digitally native brands have embraced offline acquisition channels like direct mail yet. Digital ad saturation and email inbox clutter are inflating customer acquisition costs and the mailbox has become one of the best ways to break through the noise and increase ROI. In this sense, becoming truly “omnichannel” means breaking down the silos between internal marketing groups, ensuring offline and digital teams all have insight into and access to a consistent audience-first strategy, targeting and optimizing towards shared performance goals across those efforts.

Advanced TV and audience targeting should represent a bigger part of brands’ advertising budgets. Those that invest now are going to gain valuable insights and learnings, as consolidating addressable TV inventory is going to enable improved measurement and frequency capping. Overall, addressable TV is going to become more affordable, and be possible at greater scale.

That said, while there’s a growing number of benefits to be seen from getting into the addressable TV space as a brand, the industry still has a lot of work to do when it comes to making this channel more accessible and understandable. As greater clarity and transparency comes to the channel, more brands will jump in.

Expanding Upon Foundational Identity Solutions

In some sense, the cookieless future is already here—but with less fanfare or urgency as the industry has begun to find and implement solutions. The future of the cookie will continue to be discussed, but brands have prioritized first-party data and future-proofed, compliant third-party data partnerships.

In 2023 marketers must continue to press forward in the adoption of alternate IDs. It’s highly unlikely at this juncture that the industry will adopt a definitive identifier as the cookie’s successor. Rather—and rightly—the prevailing sentiment in the industry will shift to, “We’re identifier agnostic.” Around this new reality, the industry will begin to connect the dots, as we gain a better sense of what is realistic with matching and activating on different universal ID frameworks.

Looking to up-level your 2023 data strategy and campaigns? Contact the Alliant team to learn more about datasets and approaches that can take your marketing efforts further in the new year.