Technology is always evolving and, as user behavior changes, digital marketing continues to evolve to keep up. Some of these trends are new and some have been around for a bit and are picking up steam now. These are a few of the digital marketing trends to watch in 2022:
1. Integrated Digital Marketing
As search engines began to focus more on brands, it became more and more important to merge offline and online efforts. And, as consumers became increasingly more mobile, it became more and more important for brands to be omnichannel.
You Need to Be Where Your Customers Are
Businesses needed to have a presence where their customers were searching and interacting. Although it’s been important to have a presence and offer a great user experience on multiple channels for years, it is absolutely imperative for your digital marketing efforts to be comprehensive in 2022. This has made integrated digital marketing a continuing important trend.
Find the Right Mix of Channels and Platforms for Your Business
The key component of integrated digital marketing is using a variety of platforms and channels to increase your brand’s reach. The mix of channels that is right for your business will vary based on a ton of different factors, but it’s clear that you need to be dominating multiple channels in order to stay competitive.
Integrate Your Strategies Across Platforms
Email, video, social media, search, paid, and more – no matter what combination of platforms and channels are right for your business, your strategies should be linked, brand messaging should be consistent, and campaigns should be cohesive across all of them.
When it’s done well, integrated digital marketing ensures your brand has a presence on the channels and platforms that are most important to your customers and that your efforts are delivering results.
2. SEO for Voice Search
With the continued rise of voice search queries and voice assistants, SEO for voice search has only become more important in 2022. Mobile voice search queries and voice assistants rely on well-structured information that is easy to digest and answers questions quickly, which means they often rely on featured snippets and first page results to answer a question.
Don’t Ignore Structured Data
Well-structured and well-written content can help you compete. Structured data, schema markup, and relevant, concise answers to conversational questions can help you compete when it comes to voice search. This makes things like knowing your user, strong keyword research, and solving for user intent that much more important in 2022.
3. Personalization
As search engines evolved to better understand the context of user queries and began to integrate AI and machine learning into their algorithms, the search results became more and more personalized. At the same time, user expectations moved towards more personalization.
It’s important to strike the right balance. Too much personalization and too much contact too soon is one of the ways businesses annoy potential customers and drive them away. The more you can personalize your experience towards users, without coming across as creepy, the better the experience you offer.
This also helps you better meet their expectations, and better solve their problems in a relevant and memorable way. This increase in personalization has led to the continued rise of micro-moments for users and also the use of chatbots for businesses.
Micro-Moments
Micro-moments refer to specific times and situations where a user wants to accomplish something. These are moments where the user has a specific question in order to know something, needs directions to go somewhere, needs more information on how to do something, or wants to buy something.
Micro-moments tend to be focused on sudden wants and needs that pop up during the buying cycle and will influence their decision. Prioritizing these specific moments and making them a part of your digital marketing strategy allows you to take the individual user into account and solve for user intent. Ignoring them, on the other hand, is one of the common ecommerce mistakes to avoid that is also a mistake other businesses should avoid as well.
Chatbots
Chatbots allow users to interact with your business in a personal way immediately. Whether you employ human interaction, canned responses, or a combination of both, chatbots allow you to meet your user where they are, interact immediately in a meaningful way, and also capture some of your customer’s micro-moment needs. You can also use them to help you use social media for customer service.
With chatbots, your business has the opportunity to level up customer service and improve response time for better customer service, which can streamline the process for both your business and your customers. You can also gain valuable insights through customer interactions with your chatbot in order to improve your website, create content to fill an informational gap, identify potential issues in other areas, and more.
4. Visual Search
Visual search is more than just image search and optimization; it’s all about allowing users to capture images and use them to find what they need. Products like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens offer a technological update to visual search that allows users to explore everything around them with their phone and find what they need more accurately.
With the Google Lens app, users can take a picture with their smartphone and find more information about what’s in it. For example, a user could take a picture of a landmark or building to find out more information about it, take a picture of an object in order to figure out where to buy it, and more.
With Pinterest Lens, users can take a picture of something with their phone inside the Pinterest mobile app and pull up related ideas on Pinterest about it. There is even an integration with the Shop tab to allow you to discover and purchase products you like.
5. Social Media Ecommerce
Social media and ecommerce have been becoming more integrated for years, and it’s one of the digital marketing trends that will only continue. Across many platforms, there are more and more opportunities to feature products, and even allow customers to purchase without having to leave the platform. This provides a lot of opportunities for ecommerce businesses and nonprofits as well.
Crypto and NFTs
Regardless of how you feel about them or whether you invest in them, you can’t avoid talking or hearing about cryptocurrency and NFTs. It may not be something you are considering for your business right now, but there are things to be aware of and potential for the future, depending on how things continue to develop.
NFTs and cryptocurrency take finance and selling beyond a physical product or service and take into the digital realm. Some platforms have already integrated cryptocurrency payments, and they’re also integrating with social media platforms.
Twitter moved to integrate bitcoin payments in addition to other payment methods as a way to allow users to tip content creators towards the end of 2021. They have also done giveaways with NFTs, integrated display tools to showcase in-app NFT purchases, and more. With the launch of the Metaverse, Meta is also doing something similar with Facebook avatars and NFT display options.
6. Short Videos
As TikTok continues to be popular and dominate the social landscape, especially when it comes to video, there continues to be a shift towards shorter videos. Longer videos still have a place and a purpose. But, when it comes to bite-sized content, it’s hard to beat short, DIY videos. With these short videos as one of the digital marketing trends, the video needs to be good, but it also doesn’t need to be over-produced either.
Short video posts are the standard on TikTok and other social media platforms are moving towards providing similar abilities. Instagram launched Reels and enhanced Stories, and YouTube launched “shorts”. In addition to your other posts, short, authentic, and candid videos are also one of the types of content to post on social media.
Make Sure Your Website Supports Your Marketing Efforts
There are plenty of digital marketing trends that you need to keep in mind moving forward. These are just a few of the hot topics continuing to gain some serious traction right now that you need to keep in mind for your ongoing digital marketing efforts.
If your website or marketing efforts aren’t delivering for your business, it may be time for a refresh and some updates. Contact us for a meeting of the MINDs to see how to get back on track!