Digital Marketing Trends For 2022

The market size for influencer marketing reached $13 billion in 2021. By 2028, the number is expected to arrive at $84.89 billion. But how exactly will that money be spent? These are the trends to watch:

• Micro-influencers. Influencers with an audience of 10-100,000 followers have a tighter community behind their back. They’re community-driven and work with smaller niches, which leads to higher engagement rates and assured buying decisions – ultimately, user trust gets the job done. Also, cooperation costs are much lower among micro-influencers, and they’re usually easier to hit it off with when compared to their high-status celebrity counterparts.
• TikTok. This platform keeps exceeding expectations – as stated by YouGov, 87% of influencers state that TikTok drives more engagement than any other social media outlet. With a diverse audience pool and its tendency to make things go viral at extreme speeds, TikTok is a space to make use of.
• Employee participation. Staff members taking on influencers’ roles is also a predicted course. Wouldn’t you be captivated by behind-the-scenes content that expands on the advertised service or product? This gives consumers a better perspective of the brand and prompts buying decisions.

Social media attention span has changed over the years: Microsoft discovered that it dropped by 25%, and is currently set to 8 seconds. Within these 8 seconds, you have to make an impression that lasts and works in your favor. Bite-sized videos are a trend marketers started to utilize to grasp user interest. With Reels’ and TikTok’s trendiness rising faster than ever before, video content will become even more significant for digital marketing. Besides, long-form and live videos also gained popularity – according to Influencer Marketing Hub, the number of Facebook users that watched live videos grew by 50% in 2020.

The past few years have granted us a good deal of ways to showcase activism. In 2022, digital marketing will draw more attention towards burning issues through content. The desire to cover such hot subjects as ecology, healthcare, or social justice will uncover more diversity in advertising and encourage activist users to keep up. As a result, both sides – the marketers and the customers – are expected to become more discerning in terms of choosing who to partner with.

This aspect is also linked to brand storytelling – by demonstrating passion for a particular cause, brands can convey their vision and values with more clarity. Such a move helps customers understand who they’re dealing with better and screens out those who don’t support the brand’s message. What comes of it for brands? Unchallenged loyalty from the users who chose to stay.

What is one thing that either makes or breaks the relationship between a company and its client? It’s connection – or the lack of it. Personalizing digital ads helps make the most out of customers’ weak spots and establish a stronger bond by addressing their individual concerns. At this point, we can already analyze user behavior and make suggestions based on that, but in 2022, the trend moves further: segmentation and personalized ad sets will make it easier for marketers to share messages that resonate with customers and lead to higher engagement.

An obvious case in point – in 2022, we’ve become familiar with such concept as the Metaverse. Essentially, meta stands for virtual and augmented experiences. And as users demand more original content and long for impressions that stand out, brands should consider implementing VR & AR in their marketing strategy.

Compared to customary marketing, extended reality tools bear huge potential – the VR & AR market is expected to hit $766 billion by 2025, as stated by Market Research Future. Selling experiences is the ultimate way to get users to convert, and extended reality solutions enable brands to capitalize on that.

AR overlays the existing space with added details, encouraging users to interact with the physical space blended with virtual data. Users can try things on before purchasing with the help of AR – this supports well-informed buying decisions and shows that you, as a brand, care about your customer. VR, on the other hand, creates a digital experience within an actual space, which facilitates the promotion of physical goods. Whether you’re wrestling with a monster as a gamer or practicing surgery as a medical worker, VR provides fully immersive sensory experiences.

Including AR and VR in your digital marketing strategy helps you earn these benefits as a marketer:

• Distinguish your brand from many others by offering unique marketing solutions;
• Reach younger audience members that respond to innovation more actively and utilize word-of-mouth to its fullest extent;
• Convince users to view your brand as one willing to stand out and adapt to the market demand.

Digital advertising doesn’t do without collecting and analyzing data. With new regulations from Google that exclude gathering of third-party cookie files, it gets harder for marketers. We will now have to rely on the remaining data points and find how to conduct research in other ways that give enough data to promote and support a customer-oriented approach.

This could raise some serious privacy concerns on top of the ones users already have – according to research backed by Google, nearly 50% of users would prefer not to share data to get personalized ads. 57% believe their data gets sold, but as much as 90% are ready to share data in case they get equal value in return. What can you, as a marketer, do to make it work for both sides?

It all starts with building trust. Once you’ve secured trust among your customers, they will feel greater comfort when sharing more data as you offer new products and services. Keep in mind that user trust also varies depending on the industry: according to McKinsey & Company, 44% of users view healthcare and financial services as most trustworthy, whereas media and entertainment, consumer packaged goods, public sector and government, as well as agriculture show the lowest trust levels. You can achieve customer trust by:

• Demonstrating how you handle data breaches and sharing your best practices for safe data management.
• Reacting quickly in case a data breach occurs and openly disclosing such cases to the public.
• Only collecting relevant information. This excludes data unrelated to your product, immoderate personal details, and passive data like search history.
• Maintaining a positive reputation on the market that can be proved by testimonials from clients and companies you’ve partnered with.

And if you do follow these recommendations, you’ll be well-equipped to achieve success in the new stage of digital privacy.

By the end of 2023, digital marketing automation is expected to reach $25.1 billion in market size, according to Statista. Making marketing automatic and easily manageable is a measure marketers have been relying on for a while now, but it’s about to go next-level in 2022. Take these trends into account:

• Conversational marketing. Automated software like AI-powered chatbots streamlines the marketing process by providing a real-life conversational experience. Pre-designed responses tailored to each question help guide users throughout their customer journey while demonstrating all the benefits of your product or service.
• Email, SEO, and content marketing automation. There is software that writes emails and creates blog post structures for you. And there also are SEO tools like Ubersuggest that automatically find keywords to include in your content and top-ranking articles you can use as a reference. This year, you’ll see these services rapidly grow in demand.
• Automation between company departments. Automated tools will make it easier for separate departments to participate in every stage of the customer lifecycle. This gets achieved with the help of automation platforms that integrate with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot. When both sales and marketing teams have access to client information, they can work together to adapt marketing activities for each stage of the customer journey.
• Mobile service automation. Business Wire states that 71% of Millennial users are willing to share mobile data to personalize their customer experience. Mobiles were a prevalent device for online purchases last year, with 64% of customers using them to buy a product or service – and the trend is set to keep its pace. So, automating SMS, notifications, and in-app ads will help marketers gain an even bigger share of the market.

We’re entering another year of marketing discoveries and experiments. With innovation on the rise, putting new solutions to the test is your chance to stick out and grow memorable. Now that you have an idea of what digital marketing will look like in 2022, go ahead and build a strategy that paves the way for your company’s success.