From Digital to Social and Traditional to Grassroots Marketing Predictions
2021 has been yet another turbulent year in the marketing landscape, coming off the heels of 2020 and the shift for COVID mindset. 2021 saw a number of unique changes to the marketing landscape, which begs the question, “What will be the top marketing trends of 2022?”
There are certainly some new entrants into the world of marketing but some older techniques will likely become just as relevant this year while the world continues to pivot. Let’s take a look at these top advertising and marketing predictions for 2022.
Back To List Building:
List building has long been a staple to digital marketing and the world of business in general. Collecting and gathering information on customers and prospects so that a business could continue to market to them, calculate their value to your business, and more is an essential part of business.
List building includes name and email at its most rudimentary level but can be further enabled by customer phone numbers, mailing address, and additional characteristics around their behaviors, purchasing habits, and more.
List building lost some of its perceived value over the years due to pixels being able to automatically gather information and plug into ad networks. Pixels enabled targeting tactics like remarketing and lookalike audiences, while also providing important insights into conversion tracking. Unfortunately, third-party pixels are actively being replaced throughout the marketing industry with Apple removing them from their Operating System and even Google making strides to replace them on Chrome browsers in the near future.
Utilizing list-building techniques allows a company to perform all of these tasks in a way that turns their most important business information into a functional asset. Keep in mind that these pixels were considered Third Party for a reason – your business didn’t own that information. It was your business’s interactions and your business’s customers – but it was Third Party information. List building is first-party at its core and it is an OWNED ASSET, meaning that you as a business can use this information internally or take it to different platforms as you choose! It’s yours, do with it as you want!
Most of these large platforms that relied on pixels, such as Facebook and Google, allow for lists to be uploaded to target off of. They can then either provide a 1:1 match through remarketing or audience expansion through lookalike audience targeting, which just takes the people from your list that platforms are able to match and identify and expand that to match users with similar behaviors. Digging into the information being collected will also help you better communicate based on the information people are providing(i.e. Serving ads with matching messages to people interested in EV Cars, rather than just Car Intenders). List building done in the right way can also enable conversion tracking. This requires proactive requests for information around name, email, phone number, and other information, but these techniques have been in use for the better part of the last decade. This includes:
- Gathering information through delivering solid content.
- Asking for information at the beginning of the sale, instead of at the end.
- Running sweepstakes/giveaways.
- Creating questionnaires or surveys.
- Gathering information from chat requests, contact forms, and more.
List building should already be in place for most businesses for Point of Sale, Email/SMS marketing, and more – this year you should just consider a more robust view of your business’s list.
How We Communicate With Customers:
Continuing with these changes in how a business can approach their list also changes how businesses communicate with their customers. Email marketing has long been a business practice for monthly newsletters, specials/discounts, general announcements, and more. With an increased focus on gathering this information, email marketing will likely pick up – which may not be the best for inboxes. Most inboxes are already inundated with marketing emails, so much so that Gmail and other major email providers partition your regular emails from your social and promotional emails. Over the last decade, the industry saw an uptick in response to emails but in the last 4 years, there has been a dramatic decrease which is only likely to go lower with the increased utilization of email marketing.
Find more statistics at Statista
For your email marketing strategy, it is important to not overuse it and also important to maintain a quality behind it. Weekly emails for 5% off are not timely specials – they happen every week. Monthly newsletters with 6 useless blogs are just that – you’re better off spending time with just one quality blog and email quarterly!
When considering what comes from your list building, it’s also important to consider what else is available for communicating – phone numbers! Text Message/SMS Marketing is a viable process for many and cuts through the monotony of Email Marketing. That being said, it’s important to consider the differences between Email Marketing and SMS Marketing:
- Character Count Limits: Each text message is limited to 160 characters. More characters send out multiple messages. Provide only a preview in the text message with a link back to a landing page with more information pertinent to that message.
- Frequency: People respond to SMS messages more often because they are not flooded with nearly as many. People and carriers don’t appreciate being texted too often. People can simply just opt out – carriers can remove an advertiser for too frequent usage.
- SMS for Chatting: SMS is a chat functionality – utilize it/embrace it. Most chat platforms, like SlickText, allow recipients to reply within the text chain to gather important information. This is something that would have been uncommon with email marketing – utilize it more with Text Messaging!
With all of these ways to communicate, there may be certain messages your business finds work better on certain channels and there may also be certain customers that interact with different channels in different ways. Being able to map these customer interactions is definitely an important process that brings us to utilizing “Communication Stacks” like HighLevel. These communication stacks allow a business to centralize communication efforts across Email, SMS, and even messenger/chat widgets on your website and social media. It also allows for integration with advertising platforms to track response rates and pull it all into one platform.
Diversification of Marketing Platforms:
In 2022, we won’t just be diversifying the communication channels used by companies to message customers directly, but we will also be diversifying platforms to convey marketing messages at large.
There are newer entrants to the market and then there are also existing platforms that are becoming more relevant. For some of the core advertising outlets, like Google and Facebook, increased media costs and noise, targeting limitations, legislative scrutiny, and now user-flight are causing people to look to different areas to reach customers.
Google and Facebook have historically covered the vast majority of advertising spend online – and will likely continue to be the two largest players through 2022. That being said, there are some reasons to look elsewhere for these.
Google’s auction-based algorithms lead to higher and higher media costs the more that they’re utilized. Microsoft search has always had far fewer media costs due to this and conversion rates are oftentimes higher – making it an even more applicable area for advertisers to spend their money.
One such example saw an average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) on Microsoft/Bing Ads at $19.51 throughout 2021, which saw the same client receiving an average CPA of $28.33 on Google Ads.
Google and Facebook have also long had the largest share of video content on the web but were both quickly dethroned from their 1 and 2 spots by the onset of TikTok. TikTok is now the world’s most popular video platform by time spent watching video. TikTok as one of the newer entries into the market allows to cut through quite a bit of noise that exists on other platforms, and ads appear more native and less like ads. On a quick note, not all of the targeting is quite there for TikTok compared to Facebook and Google, but neither is a lot of the scrutiny.
Video is constantly evolving in more areas than just social media. 2021 marked the year that the number of households connected to CTV outnumbered the number of households with Cable/Satellite TV. Advertisers will have to consider this shift as they view their TV and Video Advertising Budgets for 2022 to include some of the most popular video viewing areas.
Return of “In-Person” Marketing
2020 was the total absence of in-person meetings, events, and marketing efforts. 2021 saw a slow but gradual return to this. 2022 in-person marketing will be the way to breakthrough.
Call it in-person marketing, call it grassroots marketing, call it event-based marketing. Trade shows. Conferences. Venues.
Whichever your word is for it, focusing on that in 2022 will open your business back up to old successes, in new ways.
Event-based marketing is a great way to attract new members to your brand, build better customer loyalty and capture real content to deliver to your community going forward.
Grassroots efforts break through a lot of the noise and put your brand directly in the hands of prospective customers.
All of these focus on being in front of a potential customer and the marketing collateral to return with it. Signage, flyers, displays, and more – but instead, make sure these carry over to digital means. Drive in-person attendees to websites, to form fills (to be used in your list), to social platforms and more. You can even take that social engagement another step further and have visitors participate in your business’s social media content.
Get Your Business Ready For 2022
However you’re planning to boost your business in 2022, be cognizant of these marketing predictions and keep up with the trends in the environment. Figure out how your business can best leverage these changes or how to be ready for them!
