(01/17/23)

By Lance Cherry, Council for the Advancement of Hunting & the Shooting Sports

Lance Cherry, ACI President

It’s the New Year, and with that come the lists of new marketing trends. If you’ve been reading the blogs, you probably know a great deal of focus is being directed at strategies to address the rise in interactive content, use of artificial intelligence (AI) marketing, building influencer partnerships and addressing data and privacy challenges being brought on by the government and tech giant crackdown on third-party cookies.

While all of these are important to consider, I’m going to focus on the low-hanging fruit and give you three trends I noticed that anyone could implement.

1. Short-form and livestream video will dominate social media in 2023.

Video ruled the marketing space in 2022, and nothing except the consumer’s ever-growing appetite for more will change here. Across the board, social media channels have geared up to be competitive in this space. On the livestream side, Twitter added Twitter Spaces and Instagram added Live Rooms to compete with Facebook’s Facebook Live and YouTube’s streaming service.

For short-form video, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok not only host video, but also made integration easy across nearly all other social media platforms. What I love most about this trend is including these types of videos in your strategies and that they are easy to create. They don’t require the purchase of high-end, expensive equipment to hit the ground running and in fact, nearly everyone has the best tool at their fingertips already – a smart phone.

2. Social media is the new emerging customer service tool.

Did you know that more than 25 percent of marketers now use direct messages (DMs) to offer customer support? I know many state agencies have experimented with this, and during my time in New Mexico, the staff in the Information and Education Division really ramped up efforts to serve our customers during the busy draw application deadline. Customers are growing increasingly comfortable communicating on these platforms, and agencies should consider putting serious attention on their customer service efforts on social media.

In 2022, Hubspot’s 2022 Consumer Trends Survey identified that 20-25 percent of Gen-Zers and Millennials have contacted a brand on social media for customer service. That is a significant change in the way customers do and expect to do business and, like the previous trend, finding success is extremely affordable.

3. In-person events are back!

With the pandemic mostly behind us, people are once again looking for opportunities for face-to-face interactions. It is important we stop and remember what we learned during the long lockdown and virtual event experiments we experienced. Finding ways to help attendees connect and better engage are essential. Whether utilizing hashtags on social media or setting up virtual tools that can be used to continue conversations, the need to facilitate relationships exist.

I hope these give you something to think about for the coming year. I wish all of ACI the very best in 2023 and look forward to seeing you all at our own in-person event, the annual ACI Conference, July 24-27, 2023 in Lake Tahoe, NV.