2022 Predictions: Marketing Trends that Every Marketer Must Know
The marketing field evolves almost every day.
And due to the pandemic, it had to evolve overnight!
In 2021, marketers adapted to the digital world more than ever while they were adapting to the business landscape affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Later, when countries started lifting restrictions, marketers saw a huge slump in online traffic and virtual engagement.
Keeping up with these fluctuating marketing trends isn’t easy. But to be successful in this fast-paced marketing world and be in touch with your audience, it is crucial to stay ahead of them.
Here are a few marketing trends in 2022 you can expect to trend:
1. Content Marketing Trends
According to survey, at least 47% of buyers go through 3-5 pieces of content before contacting a sales representative. This is the sole reason why brands are investing largely in content marketing.
Following are the few content marketing trends you’ll want to know in 2022.
• Videos will rule the content marketing format
According to HubSpot’s 2021 Not Another State of Marketing Report, video marketing turned out to be the most effective marketing format. In the past, video creation and marketing strategies were used by only a few people because of the high costs involved. Today, due to the low cost barrier, videos are easy to produce and therefore, they are more accessible.
Nowadays, you do not have to hire a production team or pay editing costs. All you need is a smartphone and a premium editing software.
• Blogging will be around forever
Blogging is the most commonly used marketing strategy. It has been in use since the brands started developing their own websites. Just because it is an old technique doesn’t mean it is out-of-date. On the contrary, blogging will be used even in the coming years simply because it works.
Apart from boosting consumer engagement and possibly conversion, blogs also give a major benefit to your website. And, it is search discoverability.
Eventually, websites with effective blogs have more search potential and can carry out SEO strategies much easier compared to sites that don’t.
• Case studies will increase leads and brand credibility
Longer-form case studies provide you with an extremely deep and exclusive look into how brands gain from a product, strategy, or service. Some brands strategically position their blogs on web pages to influence a potential customer as quickly as possible. Other brands may put them as free PDFs that require a lead conversion to be downloaded.
According to HubSpot’s Survey, 37% of marketers plan to use case studies in their strategy for the first time in 2022.
• Data with infographics will be favored
If there’s anything that can say a thousand words through a picture, its infographics.
Infographics have a visual appeal of a nice photo but they are also loaded with information and data. These infographics are extremely engaging to social media as well as web visitors.
According to a survey, 56% marketers say infographics is their most effective content type.
2. Social Media Marketing Trends
There are over 3.7 billion social media users right now. This is why social media marketing has become a part of almost every brand’s marketing strategy. Social media humanizes your brand while allowing you to connect to your audience on a personal level.
• Live Content will be the top social media format
Nowadays, customers only want brands to produce data that is authentic and relatable. Live streams and audio chat rooms allow brands to connect with their new and old audiences while also promoting their services, mission, brands, or products.
Besides being able to interact with experts in a more uncensored and authentic setting, live audio or video streams also often have interactive features. Interactive features like engagements, comments, or hand-raise opportunities enable audiences to talk directly with those hosting a live stream.
• Marketers will opt for only 3-5 social media platforms
Every brand has that one social media platform that they have a sweet spot for. Maintaining your brand on 3-5 platforms is pragmatic. This number of platforms allows brands to reach out to all kinds of audiences without overdoing it throughout the week.
Following are a few questions that can help you determine how many platforms you should really be on:
- How many social media marketers you have on the team?
- Which social media platforms have audiences that best align with your products?
- How much time will it take to master a plan on each of the platforms you are using?
- Are there any platforms that won't help your overall marketing strategy right now?
3. Search Engine Optimization Marketing Trends
You can grow your organic online presence by improving your SEO. When you optimize your content for different types of customer behavior, you help your brand become effortlessly discoverable online.
• Keyword optimization will be top priority
Nowadays, brands use a tactic called Search Insights Report. A SIR report recommends all the keywords we need to use and all the blogs we need to write.
However, you shouldn’t worry if you don’t have a dedicated SEO team, a huge content team or extra time. Most of the marketers optimize their content using search driven keywords. And this way of optimization isn’t too time consuming or expensive.
If you want to optimize your content according to your consumer behavior, you should use Ahrefs or SEMRush to quickly search for keyword related to your content.
• Video and image SEO won’t be forgotten
SEO does not only mean changing texts but also means choosing and optimizing the right type of videos or images for a brand to boost its rank in Google images or search engine video carousels.
Optimizing images may involve activities ranging from compressing an image to adding an alt text to your image.
On the other hand, video optimization strategies involve embedding a video with a topic or keyword into a blog.
Presently, 53% of marketers who influence SEO have a strategy for optimizing images and videos. Of those marketers, 49% say video and image optimization is their most efficient SEO approach.
• Brands will increase search authority and search rankings through link-building
When websites with robust rankings start to link to yours, Google’s crawlers note that your site might be reliable and have strong authority in your domain. This can trick your Google ranking to shoot up. This, eventually, is the goal of link-building or getting other websites to link to yours.
Even though producing greatly shareable content, reaching out to share it with different websites, or ensuring that your post gets links can be extremely time-consuming and difficult, research shows that this time and effort pays off in the end scenario.
• Historical optimization will get new traffic
Instead of going through new tactics, marketers will go through the tried and tested ones. Keeping your content up-to-date and filled with engaging content will overshadow old content with old links and statistics.
Repurposing existing content for a podcast, video or a webinar will also be an effective way of keeping your content in the search engine loop.
4. AI and Automation Trends
Nearly 70% of marketers use automation. And the rest of them plan to start using it in 2022.
Following are some ways in which automation will be leveraged in the next year.
• Brands will invest more
Artificial intelligence is a subset of computer science that instructs machines to do activities that will require intelligence if done by a human.
Here are a few ways companies are using AI today:
- - Chatbots and virtual assistants: Bots offer quick, easy solutions to issues of all levels of complexity. You don’t need to have a live chat or a one-to-one digital conversation.
- - Content creation and curation: While you shouldn't anticipate a bot to write Pulitzer-winning content, you can still use them to restructure or write short pieces of content, like tweets, automated emails, or basic web articles.
- - Predictive lead scoring: Automated lead scoring tools enable marketers and sales teams to focus more time on selling and making deals, and less deciding which leads are actually the potential prospects.
- - Predictive marketing: Pondering over if the audience will engage with your campaign, content, or ad? Predictive marketing uses audience behavior data, to help brands approximate which strategy will give the best engagement.
• Chatbots will keep on helping conversational marketing
Every one of us is impatient while talking to a customer service rep or any brand representative. But with Chatbots in the play, this will be streamlined sooner than expected.
Bots are designed to understand complex human behavior which allows them to understand complex requests, personalize and write responses, and improve interactions over time.
Now that you know the nitty-gritty of the marketing trends in 2022, its time to gear up for next year. As long as you are up to speed with the ever-changing marketing trends, your brand won’t suffer.
