A wise man once said, "It doesn't get easier; you just get stronger." Change the "stronger" to "smarter," and you'll find this could very well hold for digital marketing strategies in 2022 as well!
Marketing is constantly evolving thanks to some tremendous strategic, tactical, and technological changes in recent times. Positively, of course!
This quick guide will share some of the more promising digital marketing ideas and trends that we believe will help businesses like yours crack the code for getting more customers and ringing in more sales in 2022!
Digital Marketing: Our Predictions and Trends for 2022
In no certain order, here is a collection of what we feel businesses will be gravitating towards to grow and profit over the next 12 months!
1. Go Organic, Go Twitter
Twitter is probably the most underrated and poorly understood social media channel.
Twitter boasts over 187 million monetizable daily users, with over 20% of them based out of the U.S.
Yet when you ask businesses why they are not tweeting nearly enough or why they are not even on Twitter in the first place, you'd probably get a response that says, "Hey, that that's not even part of our digital marketing strategy. It's meant for one-person businesses anyways!"
Twitter is different from other social media platforms because it features short tweets (280 characters limit per Tweet) with an even shorter lifetime (barely minutes, if not viral).
They officially pride themselves on being the conversation layer of the internet.
Whether you are a one-person startup or a million-dollar enterprise, the way you can get Twitter to work for your business is by:
Developing and maintaining a brand voice across your communication on the platform. It doesn't matter whether your brand voice is 100% formal or informal (casual, humor-ridden, sarcastic, etc.) as long as it's authentic and consistent.
Focusing on engagement more than any other metric. Think of Twitter as similar to Facebook in that way. Of course, you are less likely to land high ticket sales here, but getting your fans on Twitter to subscribe to your weekly email newsletters could be easier than you think.
Being open to playing the D.M. (Direct Messaging) game. Much engagement will happen in private between you and your prospect, 1:1. Make it count and give them a taste of what it must feel like to be your customer.
Having a highly optimized Twitter Bio. An excellent cover picture and a relevant display picture are only the starts. In addition, it helps to provide a link to the resource where you want your users to go next after having checked out your Twitter Bio.
Looking for ideas and content to Tweet? Generate a month's worth of content in no time at all with these ready ideas that Twitter's made for you!
2. Using Facebook Lead Ads
Many of the recent changes surrounding digital marketing involve the customer’s first right to Data privacy.
Google has announced its decision to abandon support for third-party cookies in the world’s most popular browser, Chrome, that too as early as 2023. This used to be crucial to digital marketers (still is, as a matter of fact) because these cookies give you the ability to track your prospects across the web and retarget them across multiple and cross platforms.
So therefore, at some point in the future, all the data you collect about your prospects will only be one of two types: Zero-party or First-party.
Zero-party data is information that your prospect has willingly and intentionally shared with you. And what more straightforward way to get a customer to share the information you want than by using a thoughtfully designed Facebook lead ad.
Facebook lead-type ads are often notorious for the poor quality leads they bring in sometimes. Still, it remains a high-converting platform because it enables zero friction by keeping the user inside the app or website.
We can give you the best tip to keep your lead form as long as necessary to qualify your prospects well. Also, having a great offer or a lead magnet with tremendous value will ensure that Facebook users cross-check their details before submitting the form.
3. Using Facebook Custom Audiences
First-party data is data gathered from tracking and observing the behavior of users on any digital asset. Now, this digital asset could be your source (website, app, etc.) or Facebook's source (video views, lead forms, Facebook page audience, etc.)
Given that third-party cookies are dying soon, so will the Facebook pixel residing on your website. So that leaves us with only one option—using Facebook sources.
Targeting custom audiences using Facebook's sources effectively could be a privacy-friendly way of running Facebook ads that are high converting yet compliant with customers' wishes on whether or not they want to see your brand's communication.
4. Only Rely on Owned Media
If you rely on social media for organic reach and promotions, it may be non-existent on specific platforms such as Facebook. On others where organic reach is still rich, the social media algorithms are generally unpredictable and tricky.
So do you want your ability to get in front of the right target audience to depend upon which side of the bed Mark Zuckerberg gets out from?
On the other hand, with most paid advertising platforms, data privacy will severely limit what user information you can and cannot have access to. So there go your advertising dollars in suspense spending!
Welcome the tested and proven principles of list building and subsequent email marketing. Once you have your list of subscribers interested in hearing more from you, the game changes, and how!
Email marketing has an ROI of 4200%! It returns $42 for every $1 invested! (Litmus)
Email marketing is another excellent example of zero-party data where you will use old-fashioned lead magnets, Facebook lead ads, pop-ups, and similar mechanisms to persuade interested visitors to subscribe by allowing you access to their personal inbox space!
Email lists are the best example of owned media and provide the following advantages:
Low risk
Long term asset
Low cost to operate
100% data privacy compliant
High conversion!
Sell low, mid, and high ticket products and services.
No depending on third-party platform algorithms or favorable bidding prices!
5. Focus on Superior Customer Experience
Apart from mere acquisition, businesses should consider customer retention a lot more seriously. With the competition in the online space heating up, even more, being able to persuade prospects to side with you, more often than not, can be a great move.
Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80%. (Forrester)
On a related note, here are four key aspects you should aim to cover if you haven't already:
Personalize marketing using zero-party data obtained from customers directly using surveys etc.
AI-driven conversational chatbot marketing.
Video marketing (concise videos).
Use email marketing to create deep nurture funnels that automatically make you an automatic choice for your prospects.
It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep one, so it's definitely worth making an effort to keep your customers happy.
6. Adopt Marketing Automation
Automation is one of the hottest marketing trends and strategies, allowing business owners to offload time-consuming manual tasks and increase revenue.
Plus, it helps you generate more leads, convert them into sales, reduce your overheads, and grow your business with fewer resources.
Businesses that implement marketing automation experience an average of a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Annuitas Group)
The use of lead nurturing through marketing automation saw 15-20% of potential buyers that were not ready to purchase converted to sales. (Protocol80)
76% of companies that implement marketing automation return their investment within the first year. (Marketo)
If there ever was a magic wand to help improve your overall marketing ROI by leaps and bounds, marketing automation comes pretty close.
The idea is simple. Identify and automate your business’s marketing workflows, therefore, spending less time on repetitive tasks and more on things that actually matter.
A great way that you can incorporate marketing automation within your email marketing campaigns is by using a tool like Sender to set up automated drip campaigns (e.g., a welcome sequence for new subscribers) and triggered email sequences so your entire email funnel functions on auto-pilot, generating leads and sales without the need for manual intervention.
7. The Rise of SMS & Omnichannel Marketing
What's SMS marketing?
Marketing by SMS involves sending promotional campaigns or transactional messages for marketing purposes. People who have consented to receive these messages from your business will receive time-sensitive offers, updates, and alerts from these messages.
Why SMS marketing? Well, here's why.
The number of people sending and receiving SMS messages globally exceeds 5 billion. This equals about 65% of the world's population.
North America has 292 million users of text messaging - that's 80% of its population.
91% of consumers would opt-in for text messages from brands. The average open rate for text message marketing campaigns is 98%.
Whether you are an ecommerce store or a health and fitness brand, the best way to make your already profitable email marketing campaigns hyper-convert is to design smart automation workflows that involve both emails and SMS to the prospects, urging them to take the right action. This strategy is also referred to as Omnichannel marketing!
For example, a cart abandonment sequence where an email goes out to your prospect after 2 hours and an SMS reminder goes out about 6-12 hours after that.
Conclusion
To stay ahead of the competition on the one hand and to be able to serve value to prospects on the other, companies need to ensure that their marketing strategies are innovative and dynamic.
It is no secret that the way we do marketing will continue to evolve to business requirements and vice versa, and either way, it will grow beyond our wildest imaginations.
It is essential to stay abreast with the latest developments overall in the digital marketing space. But, more importantly, you should be able to filter out what may be relevant for your business and put it to work to see if it works for your niche and your business.
Skirmantas Venckus is a writer by day and reader by night. He hates talking about himself in the third person. He is also the growth hacker at Sender.net – the email marketing provider that is focused on user-friendliness, affordability, and utility.
