You’re listening to Digital Drop, our monthly round-up of digital trends to keep you and your digital up-to-date. For the second episode of series two, I thought I’d start with some interesting industry insights that can help you shape your 2023 marketing plan.

First of all, Sopro’s new white paper, ‘The State of Prospecting 2023’ has revealed that email remains the top marketing channel. In only it’s second release, the white paper told us that 59% of marketers believe email marketing is more than twice as effective at generating leads than the other traditional digital channels.

In social media news, LinkedIn has announced a string of improvements and changes coming to its business platform in 2023. They’ve announced that accessibility is a key area for them this year as they introduce automatic captions for videos uploaded to the platform, as well as introducing ALT text within their advertising platform Campaign Manager, which means your promoted content will be more accessible to those who use screen readers.

And in more social media news, Meta has announced that reels now make up over 20% of the time that users spend on Instagram. According to statistics from the Instagram marketing agency Thunderclap, when you compare reels to regular video content, the engagement rate is around 22% higher.

And finally, YouTube have made the jump to giving their channels each individual usernames to match their social media competitors, each channel will now have its own @, that will also be included at the end of each URL. But the Google owned video platform has said that it sees YouTube handles as a new alternative to channel URLs, designed to help users easily find and engage with creators on YouTube.

And there we go. That’s your monthly dose of digital, all wrapped up for this month. But be sure to keep an eye on the Starbots Creative website and socials to keep you in the loop with what’s going on in the digital universe. See you next time.