We know that you probably hear this every year, but we’re serious when we say that marketing in 2022 is going to be nothing that you’ve ever seen before. Digital marketing trends in 2022 are about to show a new side of marketing we didn’t think was possible a few years ago, and introduce us to a new world that mostly exists online.
One of the main factors driving this is that we’ve moved past the point of including how users are becoming smarter when writing about digital marketing trends, because they already are, and 2022 is the year where marketers are finally going to catch up, mostly due to how the COVID-19 pandemic has driven everyone into the online space.
Now, with everyone fully embracing the online marketing space, it’s time for 2022 to be the year where marketers, brands, and consumers finally meet in the middle and work together to create the best user experience for everyone.
What defines online marketing in 2022?
To understand why the trends we are going to discuss are going to be big in 2022, we first need to understand the environment that these digital marketing trends exist in.
The difference between the online marketing space and, say, the fashion (or hairstyle) industry where trends are normally cyclical with older styles going in and out of popularity as people’s tastes change is that digital marketing trends don’t follow a cyclical pattern, but rather develop on what’s been done in the past.
There used to be a view that marketing and advertising was cold and calculating, impersonal rather than speaking to people on a personal level and selling them things that offered their lives value.
Today, the trend has moved far beyond this and it’s the personal that is the most important. People want to be spoken to on an individual level by brands, and as a result the days of the faceless corporation are all but over.
We’ve seen this especially when it comes to Facebook marketing and iOS14.5, which we will discuss more in-depth later.
The other aspect defining digital marketing trends in 2022 is the online, and even virtual, space.
People are spending more time on their screens, living their lives online, than ever before.
We’ve seen this in the shifts from Facebook to Instagram and now the popularity of TikTok, which is essentially an online society where you can connect with anyone from around the world rather than just your friends.
For this reason, trends in the future of marketing will be defined by who better dominates these spaces, by creating content that is personal and data-driven, while also navigating these new online and virtual worlds.
Online marketing trends to expect in 2022
Personalisation
Personalisation in the marketing space has been discussed at length, but it still remains a growing trend that brands and agencies have to constantly adapt to.
But how do brands and agencies become more personal?
For one thing, conversational marketing is key to this.
Conversational marketing relates to the way in which brands interact with their consumers.
For instance, the vast majority of customers expect brands to respond to them almost immediately, and so brands need to use a diverse amount of channels, whether social media, email or text, in order to fulfill these needs.
Another way for brands to become more personal is to fully embrace the data-driven approach.
One of the chief digital marketing trends in 2022 will be how brands use data to learn more about their customers, whether it’s based on user-behaviour or collecting this info manually through interactive content like online surveys and seeing how they engage with content based around specific hashtags, for example.
Once brands know what their customers are interested in, they can segment them accordingly and offer them highly personalised content that they want to engage with.
It’s especially important because after Apple introduced iOS14.5 and Google followed suit, marketer’s jobs have arguably got more difficult.
In the past years everyone has been able to get results with Facebook ads due to broad targeting and letting Facebook find purchasers, but now, with the iOS14.5 privacy update we need to go back to old marketing principles such as knowing your customer in and out.
And if we can understand our customers better, then this leads to customer retention, a big digital marketing trend in 2021 and set to carry on in 2022.
Brands and agencies now know that retention is the key to a successful business. It’s all very well selling 1 product to 1 person and never seeing them again, but the most crucial component is building a loyal fanbase who will buy from you 100 times.
By combining all of these facets focused on personalisation, there’s no doubt that any brand would be successful in 2022.
Influencer marketing
One of the main questions we as marketers ask ourselves when thinking of digital marketing trends in 2022 is how do we prepare to sell products to millennials entering the workforce, and even the ones who are younger than them in the future.
Why this is such an important question is because these people know technology more than anyone, having grown up with it since birth, casually adopting even the most absurd social media.
An example of this is TikTok, and if you’ve ever been on it looking at it from a brand perspective, it’s safe to say that you might think it impossible to position yourself on it and sell to people who just want to make trending videos all day.
And this is why influencer marketing will be key in 2022.
Humanity has always been obsessed with celebrity, but nothing like today where there are so many influencers for different products.
Nevertheless, if your brand can use an influencer to sell its product then all the hard work is almost done.
And 2022 might even see a new type of influencer who isn’t even human, where the possibilities of influencer marketing are endless in the virtual world.
The virtual world
We spoke briefly before about how the online world is, in a way, a world that lives side-by-side with our own reality, and many people are now embracing it and spending time in it than ever before.
One example of how big this trend is going to be is the company formerly known as Facebook even changing their name to Meta in order to show how all in they are on The Metaverse.
What’s even more astounding is that inside The Metaverse, people have already begun to buy up virtual real estate, spending actual money on a product you can only interact with if you’ve got your virtual reality headset on, for example.
The Metaverse is set to become the next big thing, with people preferring to spend time inside of it and actually interact with virtual products that a few years ago only seemed possible in sci-fi movies.
The sky’s the limit in 2022, where we’re set to take strides forward into understanding what technology is now capable of for anyone who chooses to embrace it.
The question is are we going to see a new type of marketing, or will marketers simply move with those trends and enter seamlessly into the virtual space in a simulated world of hyper-personalisation.
