Digital marketing is always changing and new trends keep digital marketers like us on our toes. On one hand, we marketers are always working to perfect our craft. On another, we are also on the constant lookout to disrupt the status quo. Can you relate?
Well, this article is dedicated to equip you with our Top 10 Key Digital Marketing Trends that we at Hook + Ladder see in store for the rest of 2022. Let’s dive in…
Chatbots/
Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing uses instant messaging technology to connect with customers and website visitors at a deeper level. This includes chatbots and voice assistants that interact with customers through textual or auditory methods. When done right, this AI-based technology can:
- Deliver a highly-engaging customer experience
- Communicate with numerous customers at a time
- Significantly boost conversion rates to provide high return on investment
- Instantly respond to inquiries
- Provide 24/7 customer service
- Automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks
- Enhance an agile and customer-centric sales process
- Increase brand loyalty and customer experience
Tip: When you first introduce instant messaging automation into an organization, place more focus on how to use it to improve customer experience than have it as a tool to simplify operations. To see how we at Hook + Ladder utilize conversational or social automation marketing, check out our client case studies or follow us on one of the social media platforms.
Content Marketing
Content marketing has always been a core pillar of digital marketing.
Simply put, the business objective of building and sharing content is to get your target customers to know you, like you, and trust you as these are the three steps that most customers go through before buying from you.
This is a fundamental principle that hasn’t changed since the beginning of time and likely won’t change soon. What is new, however, is the increasingly large volume of new information that people consume each and every day. Customers and viewers are spoilt for choice now as the digital space is flooded with content.
In other words, your content not only has a higher level of competition in being selected by media platforms to be shared with your audience, but when it does get selected, your content now only has seconds to appeal to your audience due to their shortened attention span before they scroll on.
What this means is that marketers like us need to work HARDER AND SMARTER in building their contents. We need to work smarter by establishing extreme clarity of the story we are looking to tell our audience and deliver that message in a quick, uncomplicated way.
We also need to work harder with a content production process that builds a much higher volume of content in different formats in order to penetrate the market in a meaningful way.
Tip: Conduct a search keyword research to identify what questions your target audience is asking and build content to answer those questions. If you are interested in our recommended list of free keywords research tools, check out our blog here.
Progressive Web Apps
Progressive web apps (PWA) are higher up on the current market trends of 2022.
Progressive web apps are essentially the hybrid between a mobile app and a responsive website, which appears, feel and work like native mobile apps but do not need to be installed and downloaded directly onto smartphones. Instead, they are run through browsers and offer push notifications, with quicker load times and offer higher conversion rates than native apps.
PWAs have a higher customer engagement compared to native apps and bring user experience to cross-platform web applications. PWAs’ advantage in faster speed-to-market, lower maintenance cost, easier accessibility, and smaller size are setting it up well to replace native mobile apps in the near future.
The adoption of PWAs may be reflecting a greater trend in digital marketing where the focus of innovation is placed on reducing friction (e.g. cost, time, steps, proprietary access) in marketing systems.
Voice Search Optimization
Research by Review42 revealed that 55% of teenagers use voice search every day.
The Voice Search feature was first introduced in smartphones in 2014 but has become one of the top current market trends in 2022.
This is primarily because of the increasing popularity of smart speakers like Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home. Secondly, Google’s Voice Search feature is easy to use and offers a higher degree of search accuracy than typing on smaller smartphone keyboards.
Also, evidence is showing that online shopping is moving towards voice search which is a lucrative opportunity waiting to be exploited.
Livestream Commerce
Livestream Commerce with a whopping multi-million dollar potential is another marketing trend to look out for in 2022.
Livestream Commerce with a whopping multi-billion dollar potential is another marketing trend to look out for in 2022.
Livestream shopping has been a very prominent form of shopping for Chinese consumers for years. A survey back in 2020 revealed that two-thirds of Chinese consumers had made livestream purchases in the previous year. There has also been an uptick of western brands such as Aldo, Nordstrom, KitKat live streaming and showcasing their products and services through social media channels where viewers can buy the product live. (More Examples)
In North America, we are barely scratching the surface when compared against Asian countries and we see a great opportunity for Livestream commerce to rapidly expand.
Livestream commerce greatly reduces the time and unessential steps between the sellers and the buyers, saves customers money, reduces advertisement expenses, and increases sales conversions for the brands.
Shoppable Content
Shoppable Content, as the name implies, is any sort of content like pictures, articles, or videos that have a direct link to a buyout portal.
This helps in reaching the customer through content marketing and makes it simple and direct for the customer to purchase the product or service from an eCommerce platform.
Instagram and Pinterest have been frontrunners in introducing shoppable content to their subscribers. Shoppable content is a digital marketing trend to watch out for given its smooth user experience and highly engaging storytelling as a market device that modern consumers approve of.
Programmatic Advertising
Advertising media is often the largest line item in the marketing budget of a brand and cost of media is rising sharply year-over-year.
In pursuit of making the best marketing ROI, Programmatic Advertising is a hot digital marketing trend where algorithms and machines purchase digital advertising directly to reach their target audience.
AI automation is used to target specific audiences with relevant ads which ultimately increases conversions, raises brand awareness, and lowers the customer acquisition cost. It facilitates real-time data analysis and audience targeting allowing brands to be highly agile and opt for automated ad buying, which saves employee time and increases ROI.
Tip: It’s dangerous to rely on AI technology to control your media spend without an experienced media buyer actively monitoring and ensuring alignment between your advertising metrics and business targets.
Zero & First-party Data
Google is going to phase out 3rd-party cookies by the end of 2023, which means that brands should prioritize consumer privacy by integrating data collection methods.
The marketing trend for 2022 is to create first-party data so as not to rely on others’ data too much. This includes using channels like emails, newsletters, direct customer surveys, and CRM tools. This may look labor-intensive at first, but data collected directly from customers will help marketers and businesses create personalized and tailored campaigns that are effective and lead to more conversions.
Tip: Data is the new gold.
Influencer Marketing
It is certainly not a new trend but is generating more and more momentum with each passing day. Influencers have a high number of dedicated followers they interact with regularly. This factor makes influencer marketing highly engaging and more customer oriented.
Also, influencers generally specialize in a particular niche with followers of a particular age, or social group and with similar types of interests. Depending on your campaign objectives, brands may be working with influencers with a different size of following (influencers vs micro-influencers vs nano-influencers.
This makes it easier for marketers to create targeted marketing campaigns that reduce ad spending and also yield more conversions.
NFTs
NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens are among the red hot current market trends of 2022.
These are digital assets that cannot be copied but can be traded only. NFTs are assets in digital form like GIFs, animation, audio/video files, graphic design, and even memes that exist on a blockchain with proof of ownership.
Brands are offering free NFTs or selling them for their marketing campaigns. More and more brands including Adidas, and Marriott are utilizing NFTs as a marketing tool to build brand engagement and customer loyalty.
While this may seem distant in the future for many brands, history has proven that disruptive practices by consistent trendsetters like Nike can quickly become industry best practices.
Final Takeaway
Among the many movements in the space of digital marketing, these are the top 10 trends of 2022 which we have identified. Keep up with these trends to stay relevant in the market and all the best in the second half of 2022!
Author
Aaron Kerr
Campaign Strategist at Hook + Ladder Digital
