Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2022

Digital marketing is continuously evolving.

As a marketer, your job is to reevaluate and adjust your strategies on a regular basis.

Did you know only 61% of marketers believe their marketing strategy is effective?

Let’s face it – the marketing trends change and so should the tactics.

Staying on top of industry trends can help you develop an effective marketing strategy to improve your brand’s success.

In this blog post, we explore the major digital marketing trends that will rule the charts in 2022 and what smart marketers should be doing.

Let’s get started!

Marketing Budget Allocation

A recent survey shows the importance of email, website, social media, paid and organic search mediums to reach and engage customers.

In 2022, marketing technology (MarTech) will continue to be important, covering 26.6% of the total budget.

AI-Powered Optimization

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a part of the digital marketing sector for quite some time. Businesses will be more inclined to integrate AI-powered features in their marketing strategies.

Add to that, the next phase of influencer marketing is expected to see the adoption of AI in everything from influencer identification to performance-based influencer marketing.

Recent studies suggest that this form of marketing is expected to grow to a whopping $15 billion by 2022. With the predictive AI-powered model, you only need to pay for the conversions and sales produced by the influencers.

As a product of cognitive search, Grazitti developed SearchUnify enabling a unified cognitive platform for every enterprise team.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric approach, which helps drive customer engagement and enhance customer experience.

The global conversational AI market was at $4.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $13.9 billion by 2025, as per reports.

This prominence will also be visible in 2022, owing to the following reasons:

a. Chatbots can replace the human connection and cut operational costs by 30%, hence, offering round-the-clock customer service.

b. Conversational marketing can enhance brand engagement, thanks to the personalized responses with the help of social commerce, AI, and advanced automation.

c. Conversational marketing empowers real-time conversations, hence building authentic customer relationships.

First-Party Data Cookies

“Cookies allow websites to log your activity, and third-party cookies give that permission to sites other than the ones you’re on.” – Justin Schuh

With Google announcing the end of third-party cookies, tracking users amid their growing privacy concerns has given the marketers a reason to change their tactics.

Hence, the monumental shift from third-party cookies to first-party cookies has made it necessary for marketers to create a first-party data strategy.

In order to exploit first-party data, you can use Google Privacy Sandbox or FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) to improve personalization.

Progressive profiling, email marketing, lead generation campaigns, customer surveys, etc. are different ways to track customer behavior and data segmentations.

High-quality data is crucial to the success of your organization. However, with the recent changes to data cookie policies, the reliability of your brand’s 1st party data matters now, more than ever.

Learn the positive impact of first-party data on your digital marketing. Watch now!

Interactive Content

Google always prioritizes quality content. Producing interactive content is increasingly becoming the need of the hour, strengthening the fact that ‘Content is King’.

Rand Fishkin rightly said, “Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they’d respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.”

Interactive content can help you bring that empathy. It can be written in different formats such as:

a. Quizzes

b. Augmented reality ads

c. 360-degree videos

d. User-generated content

Using such content, businesses can engage the audience and make customers feel like they’re a part of the brand.

It can help improve SEO, increase social media sharing, and add to brand loyalty.

For instance, The New York Times went digital to provide interactive content to its readers. They started a virtual reality campaign powered by Google Cardboards.

Users could download the VR app to see real-time news. Since they were able to access 360 degree videos, Google Trends showed that shortly after this announcement, NY Times VR became a highly searched keyword.

Embrace Localized SEO

Did you know? 46% of all searches on Google include local intent.

‘Google My Business’ listing aids local businesses to improve their local search visibility.

Implementing local SEO strategies can help the customers learn more about your business from the Google search results.

This local search marketing can help potential customers view your business hours, work address, and reviews.

No Website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO. – Neil Patel

Creating a listing on Google My Business enables you to strengthen your business position in your geographical area.

Users preferring the ‘near me’ results more is going to help local SEO thrive in the coming year and prove to be very effective in online marketing.

Use the following strategies to improve the local SEO and rankings:

a. Claim Your Profile for Google Snack Pack

Optimize and claim your profile to be a part of the local SEO 3-pack. This is a listing of three businesses users will see first in the search results while searching for keywords like “near me” or “near [Location]”.

b. Optimize Your GMB Listing

Claim and optimize your business listing on Google My Business Website (GMB). You can further optimize your GMB profile by sharing the latest updates and content on a regular basis. This will help boost your visibility in the local searches.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising helps you automate your business advertising on different channels.

Ad spend is predicted to accelerate to $155 billion in 2022. This method is an efficient, data-driven way of buying relevant audiences.

Source

Programmatic advertising allows brands to reach highly targeted audiences through television for the first time ever.

Since it enables marketers to effectively share the brand messaging across channels, it’s a good idea to explore more programmatic advertising so you can optimize your online advertising campaigns to convert more leads.

The following three trends are expected to be the key highlights in Programmatic Advertising:

a. Asset Optimization: The continuous optimization of assets will be the main focus of programmatic managers. Google brought an advanced feature to block ‘heavy ads’ to enhance user experience. Following the criteria for blocking heavy ads can help you ensure asset optimization.

b. Creative Management Platform (CMP): Such a platform can help you produce creative and impactful ads in no time for your personalized campaigns.

c. Adoption of Emerging Formats: The ad spend for Connected TV (CTV) is predicted to be more than $17 billion by 2024. Therefore, when it comes to programmatic advertising, formats such as Connected TV (CTV), audio, and Digital out-of-home media are expected to see an upward curve.

Zero-Click Searches

Did you know zero-click Google searches have risen to 65% in 2020?

These ‘Position Zero’ boxes appear at the top of the SERPs as featured snippets and provide relevant answers to the user queries. About 51.47% of users believe that zero-click searches can help them easily find information.

Source

Rand Fishkin sums up the above findings saying, “Google’s ongoing attempts to answer more searches without a click to any results or a click to Google’s own properties are both proving successful. As a result, zero-click searches, and clicks that bring searchers to a Google-owned site keep rising.”

If your business objective is to generate brand awareness or increase traction on your website, ranking on featured snippets is advantageous.

Here’s how you can optimize your website for position zero in search results:

a. Targeting question-based keywords

b. Creating well-researched and high-quality content

c. Structuring your content using header tags

d. Using relevant images with alt text

e. Writing specific and precise content

Wrapping Up

2022 is going to bring some monumental changes to digital marketing. Especially the death of third-parties cookies.

Embracing new technologies and alternative ways of marketing is key to capture the attention of your target audience. Experimenting with what the users are more inclined to makes your business relatable and hence helps in boosting traffic.

Need Help With Efficient Digital Marketing for Your Business? Contact Us!