Knowing the top trends in digital marketing in 2022 is critical to hitting your goals. New opportunities are vitally important, whether you are looking to increase audience growth, engagement, leads, or conversions.
Achieving early success on newer marketing platforms often leads to big wins. In the early days of Facebook, it was easy to get significant amounts of organic traffic. In paid advertising, clicks from Google were almost shockingly inexpensive in the 2000s. To give yourself the best chance of winning this year, review these marketing trends and determine which impacts your goals.
The Top 7 Trends in Digital Marketing in 2022
1) TikTok Is Here To Stay
Since 2020, TikTok has exploded in popularity to more than 1 billion monthly active users as of September 2021. Those numbers put the platform in the same league as Facebook (2.9 billion monthly active users) and YouTube (2.3 billion monthly active users). Some digital marketing experts dismissed TikTok for a while because of the platform’s limited features and youthful demographics.
TikTok is changing, and major brands are achieving big wins. For example, e.l.f cosmetics has achieved over 1 billion views through their #EyesLipsFace campaign. The first step is to create an account for your brand and start to follow a few accounts.
2) YouTube Advertising Is Booming
YouTube, one of the most popular video-sharing sites globally, is getting better and better for advertisers. The video site earned tens of billions in revenue in 2021, far ahead of other social networks.
There are multiple ways to execute YouTube’s growth. You can use the platform’s extensive menu of advertising options, including skippable and non-skipped videos. Also, you can work directly with Youtubers to sponsor videos.
3) Seize Early Adopter Advantage In The Metaverse
In the fall of 2021, many digital marketers became excited about the potential of metaverse when Facebook embraced the concept by renaming itself. Since that time, some of the enthusiasm has faded away.
For digital marketers with a long-term view, investing heavily in the metaverse this year can pay off for years. In contrast to social media platforms, metaverse technologies are relatively immature. The easiest way to get started is by adding a metaverse element to your online events.
For those not yet convinced about the value of the metaverse, consider a few numbers. In 2021, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) invested $10 billion into metaverse efforts, according to the New York Times. There are also more than 300 active metaverse startups working on the technology. Spend some time in metaverse games and virtual reality this year to familiarize yourself with the technology and its potential.
4) Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
Over the past few years, NFTs have boomed in popularity reaching $21 billion in 2021. An industry forecast recently estimated that the global NFT market will grow to more than $80 billion by 2016. A significant amount of recent NFT activity is driven by low-interest rates and speculation. While NFT growth may slow as the hype cools down, the category presents a major opportunity for digital marketing,
By creating and issuing NFTS, brands have the opportunity to create new excitement. For example, Fortune created a NFT based on a magazine cover in 2021. Instead of spending heavily on traditional swag for conferences, it might just be the time to create NFTs to promote your online events.
5) First and zero party data
If you’ve been following recent moves by Apple and Google, you already know that traditional Internet marketing cookies are declining in value. The end of the marketing cookie means that marketers need to find new ways to understand their audiences. The old way of running retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Google are not going to produce the same results any longer.
The solution is to focus on first part and zero party data. First party data is data you collect directly from your audience. To collect that data, you need to give customers a reason to keep visiting your website like offering exciting content and online events is the first step to growing your audience. Once you have your audience on your website, you need a way to systematically understand them. That’s where using a customer data platform can make a vital difference. With Arena CDP, you can easily determine which content, online events and actions customers take on the road to making a purchase.
Once you have your foundation of first party data, you can start to gather more zero party data. The classic example of zero party data is a customer purchase intent like color or size of a product they are most interested in buying.
6) Live Shopping
Live Shopping remains a growing marketing opportunity for retailers and ecommerce brands. From a base of $21 billion in 2021, this opportunity is slated to grow to $35 billion by 2024 according to Statista.
The current approach to live shopping carries risks however. Today, the most popular platforms for live shopping events are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon Live. Relying exclusively on these platforms means your audience might get easily distracted by other content and notifications. Further, your ability to gather additional data for your customer data platform from third party websites is limited.
We forecast that more and more brands will shift their attention to creating their own live shopping events on their own sites. To ride this trend, use Arena Live Chat to power your live shopping event.
7) Diversity and inclusion initiatives
Digital marketers are increasingly expected to respond quickly to our society’s social justice, diversity and inclusion expectations. According to Deloitte research, 35% of buyers in the 18-25 year old audience often notice representative advertising at the time of purchase. The research found a similar pattern in travel, household equipment and banking industries.
However, don’t underestimate your customers – they can see through shallow efforts at inclusivity. Token efforts to fulfill diversity may even backfire and undermine your marketing objectives.
Instead, your goal must be to authentically embrace diversity in your marketing efforts. At a minimum, review your use of images and videos. Next, look at your reviews, testimonials and customer stories. It’s entirely possible that your brand has a significant blindspot like failing to include women.
The Marketing Channel To Invest In This Year
Live digital events are cost effective and convenient for your audience. At the same time, many marketers are still learning how to design and launch successful online events. To help you succeed in the online event world, check out free report on 2022 Virtual Events Trends.
