10 Top Digital Marketing Trends To Look For In 2022
In the digital marketing landscape of 2022, the global upheavals of 2020 will be felt profoundly. Reshaped by leaps forward in technology and mass social movements, brands are facing a whole new terrain of consumer behaviour.
You might have heard this a thousand times before, but everything has changed, and digital marketers and brands have to prepare their ships for changing seas. Here are 10 top digital marketing trends that will help you in 2022.
Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends
1. Customer Segmentation
In 2022, we expect customer segmentation to achieve new heights that is not new in digital marketing. With so much data stored on their servers, the big tech companies like Facebook and Google understand their users on a deeper level than a human mind ever could.
Segmenting customers manually is becoming more obsolete. With just 100 or so user engagements, the algorithms of these tech companies can micro-segment the perfect audience. More engagement and customer retention is always the goal to achieve, which leads to higher customer lifetime value and lower ad costs.
2. Featured Snippet To The Rescue
The “Holy Grail” of seo has always been to appear as high up as possible on Google’s search engine result page or SERP. From the Map Pack to the “Shopping” results to featured YouTube videos, different SERP results have acted as vehicles. Google has showered favour on its paying customers making it difficult to compete with sponsored content.
Featured snippet is the new kid on the block, which Google uses to answer the user’s query, without asking the user to click anywhere. This poses a problem for digital marketers as users can get answers to their questions without clicking anywhere making it difficult to to put the brand’s message in front of them. To get the user to click for more information, the challenge is to rank for the featured snippet by providing just enough information to get the attention of the user.
3.Social Media With Shoppable Posts
One or more products that were put in front of the user in a sponsored IG post were bought by 46% of Instagram users in 2020, the study by SproutSocial revealed this story that became one of the biggest digital marketing stories. With easier and easier Integrations to allow users to complete their purchase without leaving the app, we expect social media platforms to explode as a channel for eCommerce sales.
4. Google Ads With Automated Bidding
Expected to come into its own in 2022, automated bidding on Google Ads debuted in 2016.
2020 was the last year in which digital marketers could manually tweak their Google ads for optimal performance. From 2022, automated bidding can tweak and optimise the ads better than digital marketers.
This is not going to make digital marketers obsolete if they devote their time and effort to other channels of digital marketing and do not limit themselves to just the advertising nitty gritty. They can still be relevant if they commit themselves to overall brand awareness, which is really hard to automate.
5. Image Search In SEO
Search engine marketing is moving out of the domain of words and into the domain of pictures and videos owing to Google’s groundbreaking image-recognition AI algorithm, Google Lens. Started from Google reverse-image search, Google Lens allows users to enter images into the search engine to obtain a variety of search results.
To find out whether the plant is poisonous, users can snap a picture of a plant and enter the image as a search. Users can also upload an image from their friend’s Instagram and geo-target the exact location. For digital marketers to hack into and insert their client brands into, image-searching represents another stream of traffic.
6. Next Frontier of SEO
The next frontier of SEO is voice search. Whether they use their smartphones like walkie-talkies or use voice-activated AI assistants on their desktops, more and more users prefer to talk into their search bars instead of type.
SEO experts have found that voice searches show different results than text searches. To capture more of that organic market share, we expect 2022 to kick off a Gold Rush to crack the code of SEO for voice search.
7. Customer Journeys
With more and more people turning to online for shopping goods and services, they interact with their brands holistically by buying, checking its social media, buying immediately, and sometimes waiting for a week to make the purchase.
In 2022, a decrease in focus on the linear customer journey is expected, which makes the guided process of Awareness-Consideration-Decision a bit difficult to pull off. It is expected that the focus will be increased on a diffuse constellation of touch points that make a brand bring changes in the customer’s daily life.
8. Arms Race of AdBlocker
Cutting off a significant source of revenue for many digital marketing experts and their clients, a whopping 27% of Internet users are expected to have adopted ad-blockers by 2022. This is not going to affect every traffic stream, but many digital marketers will feel the needle in their shoe.
Digital marketers will find a solution to bypass the ad blockers, but the ad blocker developers will come up with yet another solution to plug the holes and throw another problem at marketers to solve. Become a digital marketer in 2022, if you like foiling security and sticking it to the man.
9. Beliefs
Public awareness came to the fore because of the social turmoil of 2020. Consumers are becoming more curious about their brands and they want to know the brand’s stand on racial and gender identity issues, on politics, and on traditional values.
We expect to see companies take sides in hopes of polarising their audience into rabid fans, rather than trying to straddle the line and please everybody. In the terror of Twitter boycotts, brands will get some rabid detractors, the safest play for brands will be to wear their values on their sleeves and find their crowd.
10. The Era Of Ephemeral
Content that only lasts for a set period of time before disappearing into the ether, ephemeral content was the idea pioneered by Snapchat. 1 million snaps per day are produced on Snapchat only. Instagram Stories and Facebook’s MyDay are the response of other social media platforms when they noticed the popularity of Snaps.
To tap into the consumer attention devoured by ephemeral content, digital marketers will get creative in 2022. Ephemeral content is harder to automate because it can’t be reused and it is its biggest structural disadvantage. But it is very hard to ignore it because so many eyeballs remain on ephemeral content.
So these were the 10 top digital marketing trends to look for in 2022 according to our expert marketers. Adomantra is one of the best digital marketing agencies in India with clients from all over the globe. Check out our website for more information.
