Keeping up with digital marketing trends is a great way to improve conversions, sales and profits, particularly for small businesses with a limited budget. Knowing what’s working in the marketing world without having to test the waters yourself can be an enormous benefit, saving you both time and money.
Many trends that have worked extremely well a few years ago will no longer be as effective in 2022, meaning that you need to stay on top of these trends or get left behind. For example, relying on organic Facebook traffic is no longer effective because only about 6% of fans now see your posts. It’s the same with just optimising your site’s text based content, because now people are moving to interactive multimedia, you need to extend your SEO to videos, images and audio files.
So which digital marketing trends should you be watching?
Digital marketing trends to follow in 2022
The GO Creative team has researched the growing digital marketing trends that will help to supercharge your marketing efforts in 2022. When every dollar counts, these are the trends that could help your business grow and expand, increasing your revenue without breaking the bank.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI is not a technology that initially springs to mind for most small business owners, but some aspects of AI can be leveraged successfully, even if you don’t have a multi-million dollar budget. That’s because AI technology can be used to gain insights into your target audience, eliminating the guess work in buying online ads, increasing conversions and reducing the costs of customer acquisition.
AI technology is perfect for performing complex tasks and for recognising patterns, such as consumers’ online search patterns and their interactions with other websites. As an example AI technology can use data from social media platforms to help small businesses identify the pathways used by consumers to reach their website. You can then create digital marketing strategies to target these consumers via these pathways.
Another example of automated AI technology are chatbots that can decipher complex queries from consumers. This frees up staff who can spend their time more effectively on your business or even provide the opportunity to streamline your workforce.
Personalised digital marketing
Consumers respond much more positively to personalised digital marketing rather than generic efforts that are sent out to the masses. Whether these strategies are email campaigns, product updates, discount offers, phone app downloads or other marketing strategies, the personal touch has a significant and positive impact on consumers.
Personalised digital marketing needs to be data driven, so that information such as consumers’ location, preferences and purchasing history are used to deliver information that matches their interests. Personalisation just might be the main driver to increased profits in 2022 for small business owners.
Video marketing
Video marketing is already a key factor in both customer buying decisions and successful email campaigns and their effectiveness will continue for the foreseeable future. That’s because videos are a major digital marketing trend that helps to engage consumers and increase conversions
Many businesses already report increased conversions when they include videos in their marketing campaigns. It doesn’t matter whether these videos are how-to guides or are created to introduce new products or services, video marketing is a proven way to increase revenue.
For example, recent research has indicated that nearly 90% of marketers receive a positive ROI from video marketing (up from 33% in 2015); nearly 80% report that video marketing has increased their bottom line; more than 90% believe that video marketing has become more important for brands since the pandemic.
Influencer marketing
Influencers are online bloggers that build a massive amount of trust with their followers and are able to successfully promote businesses, products and services. The sway they have over their audience has been growing significantly over the past few years and it’s predicted to continue growing throughout 2022 and beyond.
As a digital marketing strategy, tapping into the influencer market is not that difficult, even for small local businesses. That’s because you don’t need to contact the top level influencers, simply look for personalities or bloggers with a growing audience in your local area. Contact them, put together a campaign for a set period of time and you should quickly see an uptick in sales and revenue.
Voice searches
Voice-activated technology or smart assistants have been growing in popularity over the past few years and their use will continue to grow throughout 2022 and beyond. In fact, global voice-activated technology sales are estimated to reach $30 billion by 2024 with 55% of households expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022.
Smart assistants, such as Siri (used by Apple operating systems) and Alexa (used by Amazon devices) are able to perform web searches based on questions asked by consumers. This suggests that using keywords in your web-based content, based on how people speak or the questions they ask can provide a free boost to your digital marketing campaigns (because all you need to do is include these keywords in your content).
Social media ecommerce
You already know that you can use your social media network to build brand awareness, attract online followers and generate sales on your website, but there’s an increasing trend for actually selling via social media platforms. This is called social commerce and Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest offer native shopping solutions for people with business accounts on their platforms.
Currently, these social media shops are free to set up and since they engage consumers on a platform of their choice, they are becoming extremely successful. They also shorten the distance between the ad and the shopping cart, improving conversion rates and profits. Just imagine having a shopping store on Instagram where influencers already promote your products – it’s a win-win digital marketing strategy for 2022!
Social media apps
Social media apps are a very popular way for people to connect with friends, family and businesses. Many of these apps are free to use and they’re a great way to connect with your audience. These social apps allow you to send personalised marketing messages to consumers (taking advantage of the personalised marketing strategy mentioned above). It also provides consumers with a quick and easy way to ask questions about your products or services (who has time to sit on the end of a phone!).
Check out Facebook’s Messenger app, Snapchat, Facebook’s WhatsApp, Skype or Viber, but there are plenty more messaging apps available. Select the ones that are popular with your target audience and start a personalised digital marketing campaign for 2022.
Choose a digital marketing strategy for 2022 to attract new clients, increase conversions and be ready to set your business for success.
