To remain relevant in 2022, brands should fine-tune their digital marketing efforts. Read this article to get to know which trends you might want to pay primary attention to!

To make the most of your digital marketing efforts in 2022, you should analyze the key trends of the sphere. You should understand what consumers expect from you and which steps other companies from your industry might make to get a competitive edge. In this article, we’ll list five major digital marketing trends that businesses from any sector might want to take into account. Plus, we’ll share a list of additional recommendations that should help you to sell more and strengthen your customer relations.

Focus on Your Brand’s Identity

What does the term “identity” mean for your brand and industry? Once you figure it out, you should incorporate these findings into every phase of your creative process:

– Update the language and designs you use
– Run campaigns that are representative and accessible
– Monitor the continuous evolution of your target audience and adjust to their new experiences, needs and interests
– Take care of such values as diversity, equity and inclusion

To make the most of your identity, you should get hyper-local with your marketing strategy. You need to segment your market into small niches or communities and customize your offer to each of them. Remember: your buyers are not defined by a single characteristic. Their identities are intersectional. They will be more likely to connect with your brand if they see themselves reflected in a nuanced way.

Privacy Is the Key

73% of consumers confess they opt for online services that ensure advanced data protection, such as encrypted emails and privacy-protecting search engines. But brands need to process their customers’ private details to offer them helpful information and relevant ads. Businesses rely on these statistics to target the right clients and meet or even exceed their expectations. Without knowing your target audience, it’s close to impossible to create useful and memorable messaging that improves online experiences.

In 2022, marketers should focus on enhancing customer-oriented data protection strategies. They should rethink their approaches to measuring and reaching audiences. Consumers should feel that they fully control the data their share. Marketers should openly explain to customers how and when they gather personal information. Honesty should help companies to build trust. Both parties involved should be able to achieve their goals: users preserve their privacy while brands get a more complete picture of their audience.

Be Relevant

While creating your marketing messages in 2022, you should focus on the value and authentic purpose of your brand. The purchase journey of a typical consumer is way too crowded, so you should do your best to stand out from the rest. An ideal marketing message should also reflect your customers’ needs. Your brand should have a clear point of view and express it to potential buyers across all touchpoints.

Create Shoppable Content

In 2020, global e-commerce sales increased by around 30%. Shoppable content was one of the tools that marketers resorted to to back up the growth. This term means that consumers can purchase goods and services right from social posts or when watching videos online. To create content that stimulates consumers, marketers should rely on the storytelling principles — namely, the ABCD framework:

– Attention: Hook and sustain your potential buyers with an immersive story
– Branding: Brand early and frequently
– Connection: Make sure your content makes the audience think and experience vivid emotions
– Direction: Encourage consumers to take action

Thanks to this framework, you might be able to boost your short-term sales by 30%. While working on your story-driven content, you should stay true to your brand and what you claim.

Effortless Eco-Friendliness

Every year, more and more consumers state they value environmental consciousness. They expect brands to comply with sustainability standards. Plus, they want businesses to make it easier for clients to stick to the eco-lifestyle. Here are a few examples of what exactly companies can do to impress their audiences:

– Manufacture products from recycled materials
– Use recyclable packaging
– Offer refills for cosmetics

Instead of encouraging consumers to make new choices, brands should incorporate sustainability benefits into choices people are already making.

Plus, companies should strive for maximum transparency. Clients will appreciate it if companies provide them with the answers to the following questions:

– What exactly do they do to remain sustainable?
– What happens to returned products?
– How do they handle the waste created by increased shopping deliveries and returns?

Businesses need to convince their audiences that they try to solve sustainability problems daily and not in terms of a one-off promotional action.

Additional Factors to Pay Attention to

Apart from the above-listed five major trends, you might want to keep the following factors in mind:

– Email marketing and LinkedIn marketing will remain strong in 2022. They allow you to target customers very precisely and personalize your interactions with them.
– The importance of influencer marketing will be likely to grow.
– SEO is the king!
– Before you start running a marketing campaign, you should make sure your site works fast (and probably carry out speed optimization).
– Discounts don’t impact consumer behavior anymore as they once used to — unless they are personalized.
– People appreciate pop-ups. You might try integrating various types of pop ups into your emails and website pages.
– Instead of spreading your marketing efforts across multiple channels, you should focus only on a handful of them that deliver the best results to you.
– The demand for video content keeps increasing. You should never compromise on quality when creating promotional videos.
– Consumers seem to be more interested in memberships than loyalty programs. If you try to make people stay loyal to your brand, they might perceive it as a limitation of their freedom — but they should love membership privileges.

And of course, keep measuring your success with KPIs!

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand which trends will be shaping the digital marketing sphere in 2022. Focus on brand identity and give your customers privacy guarantees. Generate content that is relevant to your consumers and make it shoppable. Try to be environmentally friendly and always keep analyzing what’s going in the industry!