Top 12 Digital Marketing Predictions For 2022
Since 2020, there have been massive changes in the way brands interact with their audience. Now, the digital marketing industry is reframing and changing rapidly.
The pandemic’s effect on every business industry had been huge enough to disrupt the market and make irreversible changes.
New trends in the marketing industry continue to rise just as new challenges are presented by the new normal.
Everyone is gearing towards adopting these new tactics and taking advantage of the rise of digital channels and new marketing technologies.
So with the year nearing its end, it’s now time to start preparing your annual marketing plans for the coming year.
To help you and your company do that, here are a couple of things to expect in digital marketing predictions in 2022:
1 – Increased focus on digital media
Although there is a significant drop in marketing budget allocations from 11% of company revenues last 2020 to only 6.4% this 2021, Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey also showed that businesses shifted much of this budget towards the different digital marketing channels.
This shows that marketers are now warming up to the concept of utilising digital media that aren’t just paid ads for marketing and advertising.
With the earned and owned media’s ongoing — and possibly increasing importance, now is an excellent time to focus and explore these channels if you haven’t yet.
2 – The resurgence of Content Marketing
With the pandemic becoming the catalyst, content marketing reemerged and made its way to the forefront of marketing tactics.
Search rankings and web optimisations have become essential factors for generating high ROI as everything went online.
And with it comes the challenge of getting the right people to see your brand in search engines.
That’s where content marketing comes in. Google has recently declared content marketing as its primary deciding factor for ranking higher in search.
This means leveraging useful and valuable content for your company’s various online channels will drive more traffic to your sites by at least 7.8 more times than other companies.
It’s just the perfect tactic to use if you want to attract the right audience at a lesser cost than paid advertising, with the bonus of personifying your brand enough to relate with your consumers, which in turn can invoke a sense of loyalty to them.
3 – Storytelling for brands
Good storytelling can be a great way to market your brand’s purpose, messaging, and authenticity. Since the consumer market is dominated by Gen-Zers who prefer transparency from brands they consume, this is a surefire way to gain a dedicated audience.
Although storytelling might not always work on its own, this is an excellent way to showcase how your company or your products will benefit consumers, why they should pick you over other competitors, and some real-life applications that work.
Client testimonials, employee stories, and case studies can be great channels for telling your company’s story when appropriately used.
Organic sharing through word of mouth, whether from employees or clients, helps companies seem more “human” and relatable to consumers and helps create more appeal.
4 – Rise of video content
According to the Content Marketing Institute, about 66% of marketers expect their budgets for content marketing to increase by 2022.
Among the various investment areas, the number one for them is videos.
As short-form video content rose to prominence in most social media platforms, including Instagram and YouTube, it became a powerful marketing tool.
Video live streams for just about anything have also dominated the internet, particularly in the last year with everything — including most events going online.
Creative, original videos are the content channel of the future with their incredible ability to generate high engagement levels and stir the consumer’s appetite for more content.
Whether it’s short clips, long-form videos, or live/recorded events, the rising trajectory of video content in most social media platforms shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
5 – Precise audience targeting + hyper-relevant ads
Many people usually ignore ads and banners they see online. Admit it; you do that too!
This is because most of them feel irrelevant and hold little value to the users. Especially when they’re too ‘in-your-face’ and pushy — looking at you, pop-up ads.
Almost half of the consumers purposely ignore too many advertisements from a brand that seems irrelevant.
This pushes them away rather than encouraging them to buy from those brands.
To combat this behaviour, sending targeted and personalised ads and promotional materials to your target audience is the best way to go.
Creating relevant ads for specific demographics will help generate more conversions.
6 – Micro influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is not a new thing. There are a lot of “influencers” on various platforms like Instagram and YouTube who make up to five to six figures just from their brand deals because of their large follower base.
However, “micro-influencers” are those social media personalities with a smaller but more dedicated following.
The best thing about working with micro-influencers is that despite the smaller number of followers, their audiences are usually more niched and engaged with the content they put out.
This especially helps to reach out to a targeted group of people and deliver an authentic and impactful message.
Most people prefer the recommendation of a trusted and respected person within their community.
Smaller influencers have a more established and personal connection with their followers, so having them recommend your brand to their audience can be a more effective marketing technique.
7 – Adoption of design systems
Maintaining a design system is more than just compiling style guides and patterns.
As digital content becomes the main channel for marketing your brand, there’s an increasing need for innovative, distinguishable, and easy-to-navigate visual and functional elements for all your company’s content and platforms.
Design systems bridge the gap between designers, (web) developers, and marketers to create assets for the company. The system allows them to reuse elements without deviating from its main principles, ideas, and aesthetics.
When appropriately implemented, design systems offer a significant boost to your ROI. They can help your marketing teams develop great content and assets and visualise their ideas to hit KPIs.
8 – AI-generated content and AI tech
The continuous advancement in AI tech is helping with the rising marketing applications.
Chatbots have become commonplace for most brands in customer service and will likely continue to be implemented as machine learning becomes more sophisticated.
Recently, AI-powered software for creating content has also increased, with apps writing web and social media content copy for you making rounds among marketers’ pockets of tools.
Even vectorise image illustrator tools are available for generating visuals to go along with your posts. More apps like these are expected to emerge as AI machine learning improves.
Gartner predicted that AI technologies would dominate every software product by 2020, and as of now, we’re that far into making that a reality.
But chatbots aren’t the only applications that AI has for marketing and advertising.
In 2018, Google launched several AIs that optimise advertising campaigns to help marketers reach more audiences and hit more KPIs.
These tools adapt to consumer behaviour and choose the best-suited ad campaign for specific search queries on various platforms, which generates up to 15% more clicks than manually optimised ads.
Not only does it help drive better results, but it also saves your marketers the time and effort which they can focus on other important matters instead.
9 – Marketing in AR will emerge
Augmented reality essentially brings virtual elements and overlays them into the real world through tech gadgets as tools.
A great example is the previously hit mobile game, Pokemon Go, where people go around catching pokemon through their phones.
This type of technology has been around for a while, but it has recently started growing in popularity. It is being developed for various purposes, one of which showcases products and places.
Many companies have adapted to presenting their products in a virtual setting with AR tech. AR tech gives the opportunity not only to tell consumers about your products but, in a sense, it also lets them experience it.
As the tech is being explored and improved, it only opens more applications and use avenues. Definitely something worth watching out for!
10 – Voice search hype
In 2016, about 20% of Google search queries and 25% of Windows 10 taskbar searches were through voice searches. From there, it only continues to rise.
With the growing popularity of voice searches, it is only a matter of time before brands start swarming voice-powered smart devices with their marketing campaigns. Amazon has already begun taking advantage of this opportunity with targeted Alexa ads.
Soon, other platforms and devices will follow suit. But the challenge is optimising your content for voice search. How does one do that?
As of now, when people use voice commands to enter search queries as opposed to typing them, this is logged in Google Search Console as a regular web search.
But when people use voice commands to receive spoken results from their smart devices, it’s not logged into the console. This means that there’s no best SEO practice for that yet. But keep your eyes peeled for these digital marketing predictions!
11 – New audience behaviour
As of 2020, Gen-Zers have taken over the 40% of all consumers everywhere. This means catering to the characteristics of this new generation will benefit your marketing campaign a lot, especially since they have an estimated spending power of about $140 billion.
You would probably be shocked to know that most people nowadays, especially recent generations, are stepping back from social media.
Many would assume the opposite, but about 32% of social media users from the US and UK have deactivated at least one social media account within the past year.
Another thing worth mentioning is that about 94% of consumers prefer transparency from brands and are more likely to stay loyal if ever.
This shows that more openness in your communication styles would go a long way in retaining customers.
The way that audiences consume content from companies and brands has changed and continues to do so.
It’s worth investing time and effort into conducting a deeper look at the behaviour patterns of your target demographics to have a basis for your strategies and plans.
12 – Online shopping is booming
Because of the pandemic, eCommerce became a massive hit with everything going online. Many people now choose to shop from the comforts of their homes instead of going out to stores, which prompted businesses to transition online.
Global eCommerce is expected to reach a whopping $4.2 trillion by the end of this year.
This means eCommerce marketing is something your company should focus on this coming year.
eCommerce marketing is all about optimising your online store, promoting to drive traffic, converting that traffic to customers, and retaining those customers.
There are a lot of different tactics to choose from, especially in the digital platforms, to create and implement a sound marketing strategy.
Takeaway on Digital Marketing Predictions
The digital marketing field is an ever-changing landscape. With the recent global phenomena, many processes and tactics have changed to accommodate its changes.
Shifting towards online platforms and using new technologies dominate the current expected digital marketing predictions and tactics for the upcoming year.
While these things are not exhaustive and definite, you can use these as the basis on which you develop your initial marketing plan draft for the upcoming year. So start working on that draft now!
What about you? Got any other digital marketing predictions or trends to share with us?
Author Bio: Shelly Solis is the co-founder of SaaSLauncher – a SaaS marketing Agency and an SEO content specialist for DesignStripe.com. She is a passionate writer in various niches like business, telehealth, photography, tourism, infrastructure management, technology and SaaS.
