2022 Marketing Trends

If you are recovering from yet another flopped marketing campaign or want to refresh your marketing strategy, this is the right place to start.

Keep reading as we explore together the best and most exciting digital marketing trends for 2022. Ready to crush your next campaign with our top tips?

Interactive Content Is on the Rise

In 2022 – and beyond – online buyers are becoming increasingly autonomous when shaping their customer journey. However, this doesn’t mean that marketers should stop looking for practical, attractive ways to entice and engage them at every touchpoint.

The key to achieving this? Constant interaction. Things like user-friendliness, customisation, and informative content will represent a massive chunk of your digital marketing strategy.

Influencers Are in It for the Long Haul

Online influencers and influencer marketing are hardly new concepts or trends. What’s novel, though, is how they behave and interact with brands on social media networks.

In the past, in fact, it was common to notice how fleeting and brief the collaborations between these parties were. The same influencer could easily be associated with a multitude of different brands simultaneously and expected to move on to new and more exciting partnerships over a few weeks.

This year, on the other hand, we are expecting to see a constant rise in solid, long-term relationships between social media influencers/content creators and specific companies. Influencers will become true brand advocates and ambassadors, which will enable them to shape more genuine connections with their followers.

E-Commerce Becomes Conversational and Experiential

In the digital world, two things are for sure; people like to shop online and want to communicate through online messaging apps. At the intersection of apps and e-commerce channels sits a new and exciting digital marketing trend; conversational commerce. Combined with experiential e-commerce, this will be huge in 2022 and beyond.

Highly personalised, interactive, informative, and inspirational shopping experiences will become the norm, and their adoption will be paramount to success.

The Comeback of Offline Marketing

It might seem a bit counterintuitive when talking about digital marketing, but there is nonetheless one aspect that we should all consider this year; the revival of offline marketing.

The reason behind it is simple. For two years, companies around the globe had to halt a massive proportion of in-person events, experiences, and forms of communication – both with their customers and within their teams.

But now that the coronavirus pandemic seems to be somewhat more under control, the desire to go back to normal is getting stronger and stronger. Normality includes a certain degree of face-to-face interactions for businesses across any industry, which we expect to see this year.

More in-person events, meetings, and conferences will take place, and these will represent the perfect opportunity for some good, old network marketing.

The End of the Cookie Era

The current marketing trend will gradually phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2023.

Marketing experts will be able to harness different targeting solutions – including people-based targeting – and succeed at reaching out to the right audience with the right messaging at the right time.

Hybrid Workplaces and Workflows

The pandemic made one thing very clear: the workplace is where your ideas are, not where your office desk sits. With unprecedented amounts of people working from home in the past couple of years, workspaces became more of a way to do things instead of a physical location to travel to.

The fluidity of the workplace concept is opening the doors to a myriad of fresh opportunities to work, collaborate, and engage both on and offline. As a result, employers worldwide will keep getting creative and resourceful to provide their entire hybrid workforce with effective, efficient, and easy-to-use tools and solutions to perform at their best, wherever they are.

A Focus on Brand Reputation and Authenticity

Filtered, retouched, or seemingly “perfect” content will no longer attract anyone. If there is another thing that the pandemic revealed about all of us, we are incredibly fragile, imperfect, and emotional creatures.

And that’s exactly what consumers want to see in the brands they buy from; a level of authenticity, relatability, and realness that will enable them to craft meaningful connections beyond the mere supply-demand concept.

The Prominence of Virtual Reality

We don’t know whether this digital marketing trend, too, might have been closely driven by the coronavirus pandemic, but we certainly know that it’s here to stay. The creation of a virtual, alternative universe that Meta is promoting (and working on as we speak) is another incredibly impactful trend for 2022.

People will be able to experience life and reality in new, fascinating, and adventurous ways by incorporating apps, tools, and platforms that transform and enhance everything from shopping to learning, from socialising to working.

Show or Tell? Video and Written Content Trends

If your brand is serious about winning the digital war, it will undoubtedly need to perform well on both the written and the video content fronts. Careful, though, because each of these content types plays by its own rules.

Written content, for example, performs much better when it’s in the form of long “guide” pages. Just make sure that they are easily readable and shareable, and that they contain zero amount of fluff, and you’re good to go.

On the other hand, great video content is getting shorter and shorter. How short? Think 30 seconds – tops. Using platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube might give you a significant competitive advantage against your long-form video rivals.

Podcast Content Is King

With voice search becoming increasingly more widespread, it’s no surprise that audio is another key trend this year. Specifically, though, we are talking about podcasts.

In 2021, the popularity of podcasts soared, with US consumers listening to 25% more audio content than the previous year – that’s a whopping total of 15 BILLION hours! So, if your business wants to win at digital marketing this year, jumping on the podcast bandwagon is going to be a move that pays off.

Shop That Link

If your company sells products or services online, you’d better start using shoppable links.

This will be all the rage in 2022, as it will ensure that online shoppers can easily, quickly, and securely purchase what they want or need without leaving the platform where they first discovered the information.

Harnessing the Voice of the Customer

User-generated content has already been a prominent marketing strategy for the past few years and is a trend that is only expected to keep growing.

Consumers have always relied on each other to shape their buying decisions and look for advice or inspiration, which is why UGC content should be a core part of your digital marketing.

The Takeaway

From interactive and personalised shopping experiences to influencers-turned-brand-ambassadors, all the way to the virtual world of the Metaverse: the digital marketing trends that we will see in 2022 are as numerous as they are exciting.

Which ones are your brand going to leverage this year? Let us know in the comments, and make sure that you share our must-read guide!