It’s no news that digital marketing has revolutionized the business world in recent years. In fact, it has even taken over traditional forms of marketing as a large chunk of the global customer base has now shifted online.
What’s more, using digital marketing techniques offers many advantages to a brand compared to traditional marketing. One major advantage is the availability of accurate data to track the success of your marketing campaigns. This enables you to reach out to specific sets of target audiences interested in your niche instead of speaking to a mass community. By streamlining your audiences this way, you can spend less on advertising and promoting your product or service than through traditional marketing.
However, despite the plethora of benefits that digital marketing offers, this industry can be pretty challenging to keep up with. This is because it’s an industry that’s constantly changing and evolving with the emergence of new trends, tools, and data every other day. Many brands often find it difficult to predict or identify the correct trends.
In this blog, we’ll share the top 10 digital marketing trends of 2022 to help you stay a step ahead of your competitors and put your best foot forward this year. Ready? Let’s get to it!
Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends Of 2022
- Digital PR
Digital PR, which was a critical element of digital marketing in 2021, will become even more important and relevant in 2022. As more brands move their businesses online, there will be stiffer competition for the same sets of audiences.
Thus, using only earned and paid media won’t cut it anymore. Brands will need well-implemented digital PR campaigns to stand out from their competitors. With digital PR strategies like guaranteed media placements, social media verification, online reputation management (ORM), crypto PR marketing, and more, brands can improve their notability and reputation significantly and position themselves as thought leaders in their industries.
As a pioneer in the digital PR industry, Digital Nod has helped position thousands of brands and individuals as authoritative figures in their respective industries over the years. We do this by getting our clients featured on the world’s best business publications like Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Tech Times, Entrepreneur, etc., or getting them verified on different social media platforms. We have a proven and experienced team that has been providing these kinds of services for years, and we have the highest success rate in the market.
- Content Will Remain King
One of the trends that will continue to rule the digital marketing space from the past years is the importance and use of valuable content. Converting leads through engaging, impactful, and resourceful content—also known as content marketing—will still be the foremost marketing tool for most brands in 2022.
With the possibility of creating content using different tools and on various channels in the form of articles, podcasts, videos, short courses, etc., the content creation process will be more dynamic. Moreover, as more brands jump on the content marketing bandwagon, there’ll be stiffer competition for grabbing audience attention. This will lead to the emergence of more innovative ways to get your audience’s ears.
Brands will also look to outsource their content requirements from content marketing agencies so that they can focus on other aspects of running their businesses.
- Tailored Advertising
When it comes to digital advertising, there’s a lot of noise on the internet. In 2022, audiences are more likely to prefer ads that are directly relevant to them and ignore generic ones.
With the emergence of personalization in digital marketing media, your average customer will expect tailored content from your brand, including ads. The more relevant your ad is, the more likely it will get traction from your audience.
This is why segmenting your audience is important. If you can segment your audience correctly based on their demographics, needs, or behavior, you’ll be able to target them accurately. This way, your digital marketing strategies will be more productive.
- Short-form Video Content
Globally, short-form video content will get even more traction. Currently, videos on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are a rage among the Gen-Z audience that prefers shorter videos over more extended forms of visual content. This is mainly due to the constantly reducing average human attention span.
While this doesn’t erase long-form video content entirely, short-form videos will get higher views and a larger engagement in 2022. Hence, brands should focus on condensing their messages into videos that span 60 seconds or less.
- Influencer Marketing
Gen-Z audiences find it easy to relate with social media influencers within their generation, and that’s why influencer marketing will continue to grow in 2022.
Influencer marketing strategies will not be limited to celebrities with large fan bases. As brands look to diversify their digital marketing techniques, micro and nano influencers will become even more relevant in the online marketing space. This class of influencers has a lesser following than celebrities, but they are thought-leaders or subject experts in their specific niches or industries.
The use of micro and nano influencers will also be a readily-embraced method of promotion for small businesses that stand to gain a lot of viewership and attention from this marketing avenue.
So, don’t stop at just knowing your audience; find out who they listen to. Doing this will increase your chances of collaborating with the right influencers and making the most of this internet marketing strategy.
- AI and AR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are becoming more commonplace by the day. And the digital marketing industry hasn’t been left out either. In 2022, digital marketing strategies are expected to integrate and leverage these modern technologies in different ways.
In fact, digital marketers have already incorporated AI and AR into e-commerce, further improving the quality of customer interactions. Chatbots, which are already a standard for online businesses, will be upgraded with more advanced forms of AI to enable highly personalized conversations.
One of the biggest challenges for many businesses when going online is providing a customer experience that matches in-person store visits. And AR holds the key to solving this problem for most of them.
- Transparency
Generally, people are more willing to provide their personal information if it helps a brand provide them with a more personalized experience. However, they’ll also expect to know exactly how their data is used.
With regulations like the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, customers today are more conscious of data sharing and other privacy issues. Hence, brands that are not transparent with their audiences while marketing online will lose customers—especially the Gen-Z—who are particular about honesty and transparency.
As a result of this trend, brands will look to work harder to earn their audience’s trust and may go as far as using third-party services to secure their customer data.
- Mobile Apps
Mobile spending is expected to further increase this year, especially with the global introduction of 5G. Hence, more people will rely on mobile apps for everyday needs.
With brands trying to integrate their services into their customers’ everyday lives, the need to leverage digital marketing techniques to create well-developed and user-friendly mobile apps for their products and services will increase.
Thus, brands should focus on building seamless mobile apps to increase customer engagement in 2022.
- Location-based Marketing
Even as brands continue to go global, significant portions of most of their revenues still come from local customers.
Targeting people with marketing campaigns based on their location isn’t a new marketing concept. However, this aspect of digital marketing will go up a notch to include modern tech like geofencing, which allows location-based targeting in real-time.
This is a trend that is likely to see a boost in 2022 with implementation of location-based targeting on platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Furthermore, many brands will also adopt strategies like sending deal notifications to their users’ mobile devices when they are close to any of their outlets by leveraging this new tech.
- Interactive Digital Content
Modern consumers spend a lot of time on social media and other digital platforms. And these users like to interact with their favorite brands and businesses in a more meaningful manner. That’s why brands that capitalize on this opportunity stand a better chance at getting meaningful engagement from their audience.
Interactive digital content such as livestreams, interactive podcasts, QnA’s, etc., don’t just improve audience engagement; they also serve as a means of client feedback and help you understand your customer better. This makes them a valuable tool for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Apart from social media, using interactive content such as polls, quizzes, etc. on your web landing pages is also an effective way to generate more leads for your online business.
Conclusion
Identifying the correct trends to capitalize on in the digital marketing industry is already half the battle won, and these ten trends will definitely be highly relevant for all brands and businesses in 2022. However, the other half of the battle is developing and executing a fool-proof plan to stay on top of the identified trends.
Even if you ace the other nine aspects, your marketing campaign may still fall flat if you don’t have a proper digital PR plan to act as your campaign’s backbone. So, contact Digital Nod today and check the most important box off your list!
