Post pandemic (gulp, I hope) we have observed some shifts particularly in the world of digital marketing here are some trends and prediction.
TikTok Will Continue to Grow & Brands Need to Take it Seriously
The app has reached 1 billion users and counting and was the biggest non-gaming revenue app of 2021.
Our north American cousins spend up to 850 hours a month on the platform and offers individuals and brands the opportunity for their videos to go viral!
Facebook is certainly worried because so many of TikTok’s features are beginning to filter into Facebook products.”
Influencers have also played a role in TikTok’s rise with many earning huge amounts through sponsorship deals. brands are now taking notice of influencer marketing on the platform.
“No longer just for the kids! Now we see a lot of influencers like Gordon Ramsay and older celebrities, even Rod Stewart is on TikTok and doing very well. Brands are beginning to see they can reach a lot more people on TikTok than on Instagram or Facebook.”
Social Commerce Will Become Seamless
It’s never been easier to find a product or service using social media. During the pandemic, brands flocked to Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to offer customers online shops to replace their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
Social shopping is expected to reach $1.2 trillion globally by 2025 according to an Accenture study that’s three times faster than traditional ecommerce.
2022 is set to see the experience of social shopping evolve as platforms work behind the scenes to enable customer payments without leaving social media apps, creating a seamless customer experience.
“TikTok has partnered with Shopify, Instagram is making huge developments with their shopping area within the app, and YouTube is also looking at enhancing their shoppable tags within videos and you can shop on Pinterest.”
“Gen Z and Millennials are predicted to be the biggest spenders as they will account for 62 percent of global social ecommerce revenue by 2025.”
The key to driving engagement is for brands to put time into presenting their shop windows on Instagram. It’s no longer enough to rely on one great image, companies need to have multiple images per product and add keyword-rich descriptions. Video is also crucial as the popularity of the format – as witnessed by TikTok’s growth and Instagram’s recent transition – is exploding across all audiences.
YouTube Advertising Will Explode
Last year YouTube’s global revenue (through its parent company Alphabet) grew to nearly $29 billion, up almost 46 percent from 2020. This level of revenue puts the social media platform on par with Netflix and is a result of the rise in more traditional TV advertisers on the channel, direct response ads, and brand advertising.
“YouTube is going to explode in terms of investment from advertising in 2022 the move away from linear TV, fragmentation with subscriptions, and streaming services all means that more advertising spend is going to move to YouTube,”
The scope for growth is big. It’s cheap CPVs and the big brands aren’t there, or not doing it really well. This means you can get a competitive advantage by having a smart YouTube advertising strategy.
Marketers Need to Upskill in Digital
The need for digital talent across industries is intense. Our own client insight indicate Marketers biggest challenges is securing the right talent!
LinkedIn’s analysis of its job postings found that digital marketing and social media marketing skills are in high demand. In fact, half of the top 10 marketing jobs listed below are in the digital or media space.
The Metaverse Will Become a Marketer’s Playground
While it has existed for a number of years, it gained the attention of marketers after Facebook changed its parent company’s name to Meta in October 2021.
But what is the metaverse? Put simply, it’s a network of virtual worlds in 3D that people can connect through Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
As a digital channel, the metaverse is relatively new for marketing, but recent campaigns have seen brands embrace its immersive nature to advertise. For example, Roblox hosted Gucci Garden, a place where visitors could try on and buy digital Gucci products to dress their avatars. Its aim was to raise brand awareness amongst younger consumers.
Is it important in 2022? According to eMarketer research, there will be 65 million people that use VR and 110 million using AR every month in 2023. That’s a lot of potential young customers to have in one space.
Artificial Intelligence Will Hinder & Help Data Privacy
Data breaches have regularly been in the headlines in recent years with people’s data being put at risk. As our world operates more and more online, the possibility of sensitive data being hacked or leaked is a real worry for customers and brands.
Due to Artificial Intelligence (AI), data is being collected about people without their knowledge through search engine algorithms and recommendation engines. As AI evolves, it increases the ability to gather personal information and intrude on people’s privacy.
According to a Gartner study, 40% of privacy compliance technology will use AI by 2023 while global spending on privacy is expected to reach $8 billion by 2022.
However, there are opportunities to use AI in a way that protects privacy. Companies can use AI in their data privacy initiatives to classify sensitive data and use it to search data to identify individuals that have asked to be forgotten (a specification covered under privacy regulations like GDPR).
Brands Will Start to Use NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
Blockchain technology has seen its fair share of detractors. As a technology that stores data using peer-to-peer networks, it has been linked with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s now the basis for another popular virtual currency – Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
“What NFTs do is a sort of signalling. Like, why would you wear a Rolex watch? Well, you’re kind of signalling I’m well off, or I’m successful.”
But how are NFTs infiltrating the marketing sector as a digital marketing trend? A huge part of the metaverse, brands are using NFTs to link owners to communities or be used as a digital badge.
At the 2022 Super Bowl, the NFL gave every spectator an NFT that was unique to their row and seat to commemorate their tickets and be used as digital keepsakes.
Another example is Adidas and Prada launching an art project to allow artists to contribute to a tiled canvas that will be made into an NFT and sold.
It’s a digital asset. You’ll see luxury brands going into the metaverse and saying, you can have this one-of-one outfit for your character.
The Importance of Having Conversations with Customers
In tandem with a power shift, consumers are hungry for information. They want answers to their questions and are comfortable finding that in an online space, whether it be through social media, a forum or on chat. This desire for answers has seen conversational marketing explode as a way to engage customers.
Conversational marketing done right can reap huge rewards for B2C and B2B brands. But if you’re not on top of your communications, slow to respond or have an inconsistent message, you run the risk of turning customers off and away!
“customers now expect a response to their query at 2 am. They won’t wait. This sort of frictionless, conversational customer experience is going to get increasingly important.”
This drive has seen messaging apps like WhatsApp become a great channel for marketers to communicate and provide customer service. This also goes for platforms such as Slack, voice-activated technologies like Alexa and social media networks Facebook Messenger and Twitter.
Chatbots have been around for some time but they are also seeing an increase in use by brands for customer support and have the potential to help drive retail sales, especially amongst younger generations, predicted to spend $112 billion by 2023.
Being ‘Green’ is a Turn-On for Customers
Greenwashing, also known as ‘green sheen’, is when a company uses marketing and PR to mislead customers into believing their products or services are environmentally friendly.
One huge brand that came under fire for this was IKEA. Promoted as a beacon of sustainability, they were called out in 2020 for illegally logging in Ukraine and protected Siberian forests to create their furniture. As a result, the Forestry Stewardship Council accused them of greenwashing the timber industry.
“Consumers are paying attention to as they value the origin of their purchases and want transparency from brands, particularly in this post-pandemic era. Companies have done a lot of greenwashing, and they’re being held accountable a little bit more”
Goodbye, third-party cookie. First-party Data (Email) is King
The planned demise of the third-party cookie is now pushed out to 2023. Google decided to move away from gathering this data due to privacy issues. The issue with third-party cookies is that the online activities of customers were being tracked without many knowing what brands were doing with their data.
While other providers may offer identifying information using PII (Personally Identifiable Information) graphs, Google is taking a privacy-preserving API approach, This means that advertisers using Google need to find alternative ways to identify and target customers.
Marketers now need to understand how to increase revenue with a first-party data strategy. The answer may be in the power of email marketing. “Email addresses are the ultimate first-party data. When you have permission to use someone’s email in a campaign or marketing activity, under GDPR, you can upload that onto advertising platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as a de facto cookie.”
This makes maintaining and building your email marketing lists crucial in the coming months. Most importantly, devise an email marketing strategy that ties in with your marketing activities to get the most from your first-party data.
Understand Your Data Better with Google Analytics 4
At the end of 2020, Google Analytics announced an update to its platform. The new version aimed to help marketers “get better ROI from their long-term marketing using machine learning to automatically offer helpful insights and give an understanding of customers across devices and platforms.”
For marketers and data gurus, there are five key updates to note:
- Better Google ad integration
- Granular data controls
- Machine learning that drives smart insights and can identify trends
- Data measurement that’s customer-focused
- Privacy-centric
Google Analytics 4 means get it onto your website, get it recording data, get it understanding the movements of your site while cookies are still around because cookies are going.
Marketers Need to Plan for Responsive Search Ads
Google is going to stop running expanded text ads in July 2022, this will affect your paid search marketing efforts. This change according to Google is to use automation through their ad products as companies move to use Responsive Search Ads (RSA) instead.
You need to start planning responsive text ads because we need to get their search history up to and in the system. Once July (2022) comes, those text ad types which were the default in Google Ads will be gone.
For brands that rely on Google ads and paid search marketing there are a number of steps you should take to plan for this change to responsive search:
- Test your ETAs in a search response ad format to test what works
- Look into combining RSAs, broad match keywords, and Smart Bidding
- Check your accounts’ ‘Recommendations’ page as this offers customized suggestions
- Pin headlines or descriptions into RSAs
- Trial ad variations in RSA format
It’s harder to rank organic content on Google
For many marketers, Google search is the place to be to get your content seen by customers. Securing a place on Google’s first SERP, or even better, ranking in the top spot, means that millions of eyes could potentially see your brand.
As a search engine, Google has a market share of nearly 92 percent. There are also 3.5 billion Google searches every day, making the search engine key when it comes to determining what customers see.
The problem for content marketers now is that Google no longer seems to be playing fair when it comes to ranking SEO-optimized organic content in searches.
But we’re losing so much real estate on Google. There are more ads and Google’s giving more of the search engine results pages to its own products. So, it’s getting harder to rank organic content, (and) we’re moving towards more branded search.
Branded search is basically any search query that includes your brand or product name. The great thing about branded search queries is that if a customer types in your name that means they know your brand and have high intent.
Another thing to bear in mind for organic content is that there’s a growing trend of customers asking questions through Google search. So answer-based content is key and make sure you align keywords with your content (more on this later).
Core Web Vitals Should Not Be Ignored
In May 2020, Google announced its Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics focused on users to measure the ‘wellbeing’ of a site from a customer’s perspective.
These Core Web Vitals are now ranking signals that play a role in your digital and content marketing. Optimizing these will improve your website’s performance and usability. The three user experience metrics used are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures page load performance
- First Input Delay (FID) – measures web page interactivity
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures web page visual stability
The goal is to get higher Core Web Vitals scores which will become an SEO ranking factor, improve usability, and enable faster loading which is known to convert more visitors into sales.
Invest in Creating Answer-Based Content
“Google is becoming less of a search engine, more of an answer engine. So understanding your audience, their pain points, answering their individual questions is important”
This can be seen in the rise in conversational marketing, but also the increase in voice searches which account for 20 percent of Google searches. Ultimately, it’s about a more direct approach from consumers. They want information and are moving towards asking questions to get to the information quicker.
So how can you tap into?
- Revisit your buyer personas – Look at what issues they are having and what solutions you can provide. Can that be made into a blog or video that generates traffic? (If you don’t have buyer personas or need to update them, use this free template.)
- Use tools to find popular questions– Search listening tools can provide you with great insights into what people are asking.
- Conduct audience research– This could be as easy as sending an email to engaged subscribers or asking for inputs on one of your social media channels.
- Create an FAQ Schema– Use a code to tell search engines that the content is in a Q&A format so it can be ranked higher than other content.
- Create quality and relevant content – This may seem obvious, but the content you create to answer a question should do just that. Do not use it as an opportunity to sell.
As you can see, 2022 is going to be an exciting and busy year for marketers!