The pandemic has reshaped every area of business. Buying behavior changed too: it turned out to be convenient to purchase goods and services online without being tied to location or time.
According to McKinsey, since early 2020 digital marketing has been developing 30 times faster than before: some companies quickly adapted and improved their digital tools, while others tried online marketing and commerce for the first time and are rapidly scaling up.
General trends in digital marketing 2022
Personalization
Creating "one-size-fits-all" content and hoping to attract the most customers in 2022 is a bad idea. Usually, what suits everyone actually brings no real value.
When promoting a product, you need to clearly understand who your target audience is, how it segments, what part of your product appeals to each segment, what content those segments prefer, in what format and on which platform. You must not only create highly personalized content but also know through which channels and at what times to deliver it.
42% of people surveyed by Adobe said they find non-personalized content annoying. So brands should tailor content to context — the effort pays off if each person in every segment of your target audience feels heard and understood.
Metaverses and virtual reality
Last year Mark Zuckerberg made an ambitious statement: Facebook is developing the Metaverse — the next generation of social networks or even the internet.
You don’t have to wait for Mark to build the "internet of the future" — you can try augmented reality as a new marketing trend this year using a smartphone and VR kits. Experts believe VR marketing will be a breakthrough in 2022.
What about content marketing?
According to Technavio, the compound annual growth rate of content marketing in 2022 will be 16%. Content is the most cost-effective digital marketing tool: it costs half as much as regular advertising, generates three times more leads, and produces 20% more organic traffic than other tools.
The main trend in content marketing: short, entertaining, informative formats. Your content should be organic, lively, authentic — i.e., as unlike advertising as possible. Video marketing still leads this niche. Today most people prefer to watch a short informative clip rather than read an article (even a well-illustrated one). And if the clip is under 3 minutes, the chances it will be watched to the end are almost 100%.
So TikTok and Instagram videos will remain popular and help hold customers' attention.
Statistics are unforgiving:
- about 80% of users buy apps or software after watching a video;
- YouTube ranks second in terms of traffic in the US (organic traffic);
- marketers agree: video marketing is an excellent tool for brands, and the 2021 financial results clearly demonstrate this.
At the same time, videos must provide value to your target audience and meet your marketing goals: motivate people to register for an event, subscribe to a newsletter, or buy. If you already have videos that generate strong engagement, you can safely use them for advertising — this helps you build a warm audience.
Strangely enough, alongside the trend for fast, concise content there is growing interest in live formats. Clubhouse, Live Audio Rooms, podcasts on YouTube and Amazon — big companies know: the longer you hold attention, the better. In this respect Facebook has gone furthest with audio rooms, live streams for niche conversations, and Reels to attract organic reach.
Let’s look at what we need to work on within each digital marketing channel in 2022.
Social networks
Reputation
Some companies already use social listening to build or adjust reputation, better understand their target audience, launch products people actually need, or more effectively promote existing ones.
Reviews on your company's resources, rating sites, product usage experience, recommendations to friends — priceless information that should be collected and used correctly.
Micro-influencers
Bloggers with audiences up to 10,000 followers will become popular advertising "platforms" in 2022. Why?
The quality of followers for these small blogs is much higher — the audience trusts the blogger more, is more engaged and active, and advertising is cheaper.
Micro-bloggers are often niche, so the likelihood that interested people will see your ad is quite high. Some companies already build their social media marketing using this method.
One-click direct sales
Companies can already tag their products in posts. By clicking the tag, a user can buy the product directly in Instagram. They don’t need to go to the website, register, or take any extra steps.
TikTok and Facebook are testing services that will allow selling products directly during live streams, and Alibaba and Twitter have already enabled this for some user categories. This greatly simplifies life for social media managers: you no longer need to prove the effectiveness of social networks to owners — just create a business account and sell directly from Instagram or TikTok.
User-generated content
Use your customers. Strange as it sounds. Why constantly shoot and write yourself when you can pay a customer a small fee to talk about your product on their account? Then simply repost their review on your business account. Statistically, such reviews get 28% more engagement than branded advertising content. People trust "an ordinary person like them" much more readily than a brand.
Key points for SMM strategies:
- Among millennials and Gen Z, who form the core of content consumers and the paying audience, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels are most popular. This means people want bold, vivid, informative content they want to share.
- The best platforms for advertising placement are Facebook and YouTube. They have high-value user bases.
- For industry content and niche expertise — LinkedIn.
- Pinterest and Etsy are mainly "female" platforms.
What’s new and important in SEO
SEO remains a classic promotion tool. But it will change as well. Google believes in optimization for people. To help the search engine understand users like a human, developers created the BERT and MUM machine learning algorithms.
So when generating search results, the system focuses more on search intent.
Search intent is the reason someone looks for something online. It’s the cornerstone of SEO in 2022. By analyzing a query, Google tries to understand its meaning and find all relevant information. For example, when a user types "amazon" into the search bar, the system understands the user is most likely looking for the online store, not the Amazon River. Therefore in 2022 it’s important to create content based on users’ search intents.
How to do it?
When studying search engine results pages for a query, pay attention to:
- type of content. Is it a blog article, a video, or a site page for a specific product/service?
- content format. Checklists, reviews, guides, descriptions — these are formats.
- USP — what qualities are highlighted as most important? Can you immediately understand what it’s about?
What else is important in SEO
- A comprehensive approach
Search engines are getting smarter, so SEO needs to focus more on the value of the information you share with users. Don’t obsess over mechanical optimization techniques.
- Local SEO
Google My Business tools are still relevant, free, and effective. Use them wisely, and it will be much easier for customers to find you.
- Voice search
Given users’ tendency for multitasking and "hands-free" actions, voice search is an excellent tool. Optimizing web resources for voice search differs little from standard optimization, since search engines still generate results in written form.
This method has only one significant downside for marketers — zero click.
What’s new in PPC
Automation is gaining momentum. Let programs handle ad testing, statistics, and identifying ineffective or, conversely, top-performing CTAs — this helps quickly find non-working ads and select the most effective tool combinations in PPC.
Artificial intelligence is no longer an innovation: AI can analyze keywords, filter out ineffective ones, suggest low-frequency long-tail keywords, predict click volumes and the optimal bid for your PPC campaigns.
Focus on the buyer’s journey
This year PPC specialists should study the customer journey in detail — from pains and social indicators to how customers manage information, what they save, and which ads they respond to.
Personal data
Google has announced that cookies, which many marketers use to fine-tune ad campaigns, will disappear by 2023. So marketers should encourage customers to leave personal data — email, name, preferences — and analyze what, when, how, and under what conditions people buy.
More doesn’t mean better
Experienced marketers know that many leads do not equal many sales.
In 2022 focus on getting the maximum number of real paying customers. Integrate Google Ads with your CRM or collect information manually. A lead may cost more this way, but conversions will be higher and costs will fall fairly quickly.
ASO optimization
The world has changed. Remotely you can do almost everything: buy food, various goods, work, and manage others’ work. All of this is possible and easy with mobile apps, and in the last two years their number has reached millions.
What should you do to avoid getting lost among similar competitor offerings?
Study your target audience
Why do people buy some apps and not others? What attracts, annoys, or is convenient for them? How well does your app work on different devices? Answering these questions lets you create a product your target audience will like and adjust existing ones.
Focus on keywords
Choose low-frequency keywords and long-tail phrases to promote mobile apps. If you know your target audience well, this is easy. Long descriptive keywords cover more search intents than short high-frequency queries.
Track traffic and app ranking. Popularity is affected by many factors: season, trends, competitors, even the day of the week. Watch how keywords perform to adjust your app promotion strategy in time.
Conversion is everything
Don’t neglect simple A/B testing. Use native tests to choose the best versions of any app elements — icons, the main image, screenshots. This lets you know (not guess) what users like, avoid wasted budget, and attract more buyers.
The A/B testing feature is already integrated into the Google Play and App Store consoles, which significantly simplifies ASO promotion.
In conclusion
When talking about new marketing trends, experts across digital niches agree on several points:
- Study your target audience; make the customer, their intents and desires the center of your brand/product/company universe.
- Make life easier for users. Be accessible — from a presence on social networks and Google Maps to the best delivery terms and after-sales service.
- Make life easier for yourself. Automate all possible processes, connect artificial intelligence — let it handle routine work.
- Be flexible and respond to changes — they happen now more often and faster than ever.
