Digital marketing trends for 2022

With data more important than ever, being able to organise, categorise and segment that data your business holds not only makes your job easier, it’ll also allow you to achieve exponentially more. So what are the key marketing trends for 2022? Read on…

Omnichannel

The days of being able to focus your attention on one or two channels and ignore others are well and truly over. More than ever, consumers are comfortable researching and shortlisting potential purchases across multiple channels. That means you need to provide a consistent approach across every channel they’re likely to use in order to make their experience with your brand as seamless as possible. 

If you’re wondering why this is so important, it’s simple. Your competitors will be working to create a consistent omnichannel experience for consumers. If you don’t do it as well, if not better, you risk hemorrhaging customers to your rivals.

Hyper-personalisation

The power of personalisation will become ever more important in 2022. Consumers are familiar with being targeted based on the products they view and the actions they take online, but they’re also used to lazy, loose segmentation that doesn't take into account their individuality. Delivering very specific marketing campaigns to individuals will become more important than ever as broad personalisation is no longer enough to stand out.

Crucial to the ability to hyper-personalise will be marketing automation – more on that shortly – but a Customer Data Platform is a marketer’s friend here and will allow you to process vast swathes of data into usable customer profiles, ripe for pinpoint targeting with relevant products or services. 

Marketing Automation

Key to being able to deliver on your personalisation ambitions in 2022 will be marketing automation. The ability to automate workflows and audience segmentation will allow you to market in very specific ways to your audiences.

Creating efficiencies as digital marketing becomes more and more complex is essential to delivering ROI on your campaigns without loading your business with extra staffing costs.

A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, takes on much of the heavy lifting of automating campaigns and segmented audiences effectively, leaving you free to ensure the content you’re creating is likely to drive conversions. 

AI marketing

Being able to deliver on consumers’ expectations is a key element of marketing in 2022. Consumers are used to being able to contact brands 24/7 and get the answers they need at the press of a button. AI solutions allow brands to continue the conversation with consumers long after their human teams are tucked up in bed.

Machine learning adapts and learns from previous conversations to interact in more useful ways with potential customers and pulls information from a variety of sources to answer customer questions without the need for scripting. Adopting AI technology now will also pay dividends for the future, as the more it’s used, the more powerful it becomes.

Conversational Commerce 

A strong omnichannel strategy that moves consumers down the funnel but neglects the final stage of a purchase is, sadly, a fairly familiar experience for most consumers. Being able to order and pay from whichever platform you’re using at the point you’ve decided to make a purchase reduces abandoned carts caused by cross-platform frustration. 

Being able to, for example, ask product-related questions on WhatsApp and then buy directly from a link in the conversation via a bespoke payment platform makes for a frictionless purchase experience that removes unnecessary barriers to conversion and reduces the likelihood of lost sales. 

Owning your audience

Ever since social media platforms arrived on the scene, marketers have been using them to promote goods and services. As the platforms began to mature, they created their own ad-driven business models, alongside the associated algorithmic penalties for not lining the platforms’ pockets with ad spend. From that point on, your social audience was rented.

It’s likely you’ll have a destination website and data that you own on your customers or prospective customers. Creating campaigns that target audiences you own should be a priority for 2022. But how do you reach them? There are a number of ways, but few (social channels included) are as effective as SMS and email marketing. 

With a 98% open rate, SMS is one of the most effective marketing tools in your arsenal. Similarly, email represents ROI far in excess of any social channel. Creating a weekly newsletter, for example, will help you to reach customers who are happy for you to contact them and ready to engage with the content you’re providing them with. 

CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud solution offers an array of tools to make automating your marketing and staying on top of these key marketing trends simple. We’d love to talk to you about how we can streamline your marketing efforts in 2022 and beyond, get in touch and let’s talk.