In the past few years, marketers have had to rethink marketing strategies, tactics, and how they communicate with customers and prospects.
If you want to compete and grow revenues this year, you must understand how to navigate marketing trends successfully.
Here are 5 of the hottest marketing trends for 2022.
If you’re looking for more trends, read about seven more hot marketing trends for 2022.
1. Good Customer Experience is Essential
Customer experience is the secret sauce of a successful marketing strategy and a successful brand strategy.
Conversations and Stories
To win in 2022, you have to tell engaging and consistent stories using multiple marketing channels and social networks.
Do this while improving your content to be more conversational and personal.
What does this mean for you, as a business owner or marketer?
To successfully market in 2022, you must find ways to engage customers and prospects. Among other things:
- Build marketing campaigns based on carefully planned strategies.
- Build an authentic, trustworthy brand.
- Create compelling, high-quality content that tells memorable stories. This is especially critical if you’re marketing to women.
- Don’t be pushy or sales-y.
- Give your audience accurate, actionable information they can use in their daily lives.
- Create educational content that helps your target audience understand your products and services and teaches them something actionable and valuable.
It’s tempting to use automated tools like AI-based content generators to speed up your marketing efforts. But for most businesses, this is a mistake. People can tell the difference between content written by computers and content created by real people.
People crave and strongly prefer authentic interactions. If your brand fills this need earnestly and honestly, you will grow your business faster.
Create Interactive Content
Interactive content will continue to grow in popularity.
For example, polls and quizzes remain successful hooks in marketing campaigns and essential tools you should consider in your marketing strategy. We’ve been using this strategy at crowdspring for years, and it’s been effective.
For example, our five-question logo quiz asks prospective customers to pick the better company logo from several choices. Only 24% of people answer all five questions correctly.
Our five-question business name quiz asks prospective customers to pick the better business name from several choices. Only 20% of people answer all five questions correctly.
Quizzes and polls can be light, fun, shareable, and quick. You’ll entertain customers but also learn valuable information about them.
There are many other valuable ways to create interaction, including reports, guides, infographics, interactive eBooks, and short-form videos (more about those below).
2. Privacy Marketing Builds Trust
Brands like Apple have made privacy marketing a considerable part of their overall marketing strategy and have successfully and compellingly differentiated their products from competitors.
As a result, people have become increasingly aware of privacy.
Hacks, viruses, and unauthorized, secret data collection on the web and mobile apps have led many people to distrust technology and brands.
Collectively, consumers and regulators have demanded better privacy policies and practices. They’ve held brands accountable for how they collect and use data. Huge brands like Facebook have been put under the microscope because they have demonstrated a repeated disregard for people’s privacy.
There’s been a strong call for transparency for the past few years, and this call will continue to grow stronger.
Marketing Automation is Becoming More Popular
Successful brands are investing in marketing automation. AI technology and advancements in data science have allowed marketers to analyze purchase behaviors, browsing history, and other information to personalize marketing and advertising campaigns.
So, rather than showing generic and intrusive ads that fatigue people and create disinterest and distrust, you can create more personal, unique marketing and advertising tactics tailored more closely to your customers’ interests.
AI can already analyze and predict your customer’s next move. And while AI isn’t trivial to use in your campaigns, many small-business-focused products can help you build intelligent campaigns that target ads, products, or services right when a prospective customer wants or needs those products or services.
Such a personalized experience can create strong customer loyalty and a genuine benefit for your target audience.
3. Short-form Videos
TikTok has evolved from a Gen Z-skewed platform into a mammoth marketing machine.
While you shouldn’t ignore TikTok and its many lessons, TikTok is not the only platform for short-form videos.
For the past few years, the world had to get creative from the confines of our homes. We haven’t had access to many advanced tools to generate flashy advertising and marketing campaigns. As a result, a DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic has become popular. While production-quality content looks great, it lacks the personable and relatable feeling of DIY content.
And because our brains are conditioned to be more responsive to instant rewards, short-form videos have grown in popularity. The reason for this is simple: the shorter it takes to get a jolt of dopamine, the better.
That’s the secret sauce to TikTok, and it’s the same strategy used by other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram Stories/Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
4. Content is Still King
Content has dominated marketing for years because well-produced content is lasting, engaging, and builds brand awareness.
But, like everything else, content constantly evolves.
People have become meticulous and selective about the content they read and share and the platforms they use.
This shift in consumer behavior requires businesses to evolve and adapt to how they create, share, and promote content.
Video content has dominated over the past few years and will continue to dominate in 2022. You can expect video to become even more essential in your business’ marketing toolkit.
The biggest challenge for business owners and marketers is how to optimize video content to stand out. Fortunately, video production is not as intimidating as it was years ago. What would’ve taken weeks and a multi-person team to produce can now be done by one person in several clicks with tools like Adobe Spark Video and InVideo.
5. Micro-influencer Power
Unlike celebrities, who often have millions of followers, micro-influencers typically have 1,000 to 100,000 followers. However, what the micro-influencer lacks in followers is balanced by strong audience engagement.
In the past few years, engagement rates of micro-influencers have increased by an average of 130%. This success can be attributed to several factors:
- Celebrities are often out of touch with reality. They broadcast from million-dollar mansions and often complain about first-world problems. People are increasingly finding it difficult to relate to these problems.
- Micro-influencers typically are more like their followers. They are more relatable, less intimidating, and easier to understand.
- Micro-influencers are instinctively aware of what to say, when to say it, and how to convey their message.
- Because their followers are smaller, micro-influencers are more involved and engaged with their audience. That provides the genuine connection people crave.
- Micro-influencers are also less expensive. Their pricing is affordable, they are easier to work with, and most can quickly produce content. This helps marketers and small businesses to deliver content to the right target audience on time.
Do your due diligence. Your company’s identity is closely tied to influencers, so pick micro-influencers who will lift your marketing campaigns and not expose you to controversy.
Marketing is rapidly evolving. New trends require new strategies. Business owners and marketers who adapt to these changes will thrive in 2022.
