8 Marketing Trends to Embrace in 2022

If 2020 and 2021 taught us anything, it’s the importance of adapting to change and rolling with the unexpected. The uncertainty and unsettled nature of our world continues, and as we think about key marketing trends for 2022, let’s start with that notion of fluidity:

1.???Fluid Brand: In 2021, Dixon Schwabl unveiled The New Us, Dixon Schwabl + Company. Our mission? We are change agents, responsible for creating more connected, conscious and compassionate brands. Our purpose? To provoke progress. In 2022, it’s not good enough for marketing to drive results. It needs to drive change – to impact your organization, and ideally, our society as well. One-third of B2C marketers find social responsibility to be an effective marketing trend, and 45% of marketers plan to increase their investment in social responsibility in 2022.

2.???Zero-Party Data: The stronger your brand, the more you connect with your audiences at the right place and right time, the more familiar you will be with your first-party data. And, as we have stated in this marketing trends blog on an annual basis, first-party data (the data set by you) is more important than ever before with Google soon saying goodbye to third-party cookies (data obtained or purchased from sites and sources that are not your own). But, what about zero-party data? Zero-party data is information a customer directly shares with your brand. Examples include opting-in to certain elements of your preference center (ex: webinar series or a financial industry newsletter), purchase intentions, how the person wants your brand to recognize and connect with them.

Fatemeh Khatibloo, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, says zero-party data “is gold.”

?“When a customer trusts a brand enough to provide this really meaningful data, it means that the brand doesn’t have to go off and infer what the customer wants or what [their] intentions are.”

3.???Data Science: Does your marketing team have a data scientist (or more than one?). If not, it’s time to plan for one. Why? Data scientists can build models that analyze how your marketing spend is driving return on investment, models that recommend how to distribute your budget across locations, channels and campaigns to align with key performance metrics.

?The top value is in the predictive element of the models they build so that it’s not just sharing results, it’s using the history of your campaigns, environmental factors, your audience and more to inform future recommendations. Data scientists can also build models that estimate the lifetime value of each customer based on their purchase history and brand engagement. With this foundation, you can better segment your audiences and know when they want to be connected to and with what content, without having to manually come up with the recommendations on our own. Trust the model, test the recommendation, learn and grow.

The average marketer will be working with, on average, 15 different data sources in 2022 (Salesforce State of Marketing 2021 Report). You need a team dedicated to data.

4.???Trust Tech: There are a number of different ways you can trust technology. Let’s share a few here.?

·??????Dynamic creative for Facebook ads – you supply Facebook with 4-5 images, headlines and ad copy – Facebook takes those to automatically generate the best mix of images, headlines and copy to drive performance for your campaign.?

·??????Automate your search campaigns - It provided a jolt for Nespresso. Just before the pandemic, Nespresso embarked on automating 130 actively managed Search campaigns into 20 fully automated campaigns. When the pandemic hit, coffee shops and retail stores closed in Germany, changing search queries. Nespresso’s Google Search campaigns reacted immediately by automatically adjusting bids across keywords and budgets. Customers went to Nespresso’s online store, resulting in purchases increasing 25% year-over-year.

Check out smart bidding and cross-channel bidding through Google as well. You will always need a human element to lead your campaigns, but by trusting technology, you will be able to spend more time on the insights and improvements over the execution.

5.???Delight Your Customers: According to Salesforce’s 2021 State of Marketing Report (previously referenced), 78% of marketing organizations have changed or prioritized metrics due to the pandemic. When you look at where the biggest growth rates are for what marketers are now measuring, they’re all focused on the customer.

·??????29% growth rate in marketers measuring customer referral rates/volume (68% of marketers overall)

·??????26% growth rate in customer acquisition cost (73% overall)

·??????22% growth rate in customer satisfaction analytics (75% overall)

?How can you delight your customers? Build a welcome series for new customers, where you leverage your marketing automation engine to welcome them with a series of 3-4 drip emails. Look at what content they’re engaging with on your site and deliver personalized content to them based on their interests. Invite them to a conference you know they would find value in. Your customers are your biggest growth opportunity – delight them.

?6.??Delight Your Accounts: Take delighting your customers to the next level by delighting your accounts – current ones and prospective ones.

?Marketo defines Account Based Marketing (ABM) as “a strategy that employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with a defined set of target accounts in a highly coordinated fashion.”

?According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers report using ABM, up 15% from 2020. To succeed in ABM, you need to:

·??????Start small – focus on less than 50 accounts to start so you can test and learn to apply across a larger number.?

·??????Focus by vertical – identify target accounts among a specific vertical you excel in, and deliver thought leadership to those accounts to nurture customers to grow with you and to attract new business in.?

·??????Stock up on content – you will need a library (at least 8-12 pieces) of content designed for your target accounts that you can tap into and leverage through a pillar page on your website, email deployment, social media and paid media. Package your content up into a monthly industry newsletter and webinar series.

·??????Leverage marketing automation – a marketing automation software like Marketo or HubSpot makes it easier for your marketing and sales teams to work more efficiently, send personalized content, and track your ABM campaign’s impact on revenue won.?

·??????Paid media – without paid media, it will be hard for the accounts you are targeting that are not customers to learn who you are and why they should do business with you.?

·??????Measurement plan – develop a measurement plan to align success of the campaign to. Example key performance indicators include – revenue won, account lead scoring, # of accounts engaging with content (web traffic, asset downloads, form fills), paid media’s impact on driving new accounts into the program.?

7.??Influencer Marketing: In our December webinar, we talked with the PGA TOUR, PGA TOUR’s RBC Heritage event and Slate about the growth of TikTok, specifically among the 18 to 29-year-old age group. Is TikTok right for you? If so, how do you use it? Why is it so different from other social media platforms and what are other social media platforms copying from it? We get into it in that webinar and it was a good discussion. Check it out.

?TikTok’s popularity is connected in part to the growth of influencer marketing, which is estimated to reach $15 billion by 2022. The way to succeed in influencer marketing is to target micro-influencers who have a very defined audience that aligns with your brand’s mission (think foodie for a restaurant, travel influencer for a tourism entity) and holding your influencer accountable to metrics that impact business growth. So, it’s beyond the likes and shares. Its impact on web traffic and utilization of coupon codes, for example.

8.??Meta: The prefix “meta” means beyond, after or across. With Facebook rebranding to Meta, the company is no longer going to be Facebook first and will focus on building virtual reality products. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “Beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things.”

In 2022, it’s important to remember to be more present with each other, whether that’s virtually or in-person. Drop the second screen distraction. Take a break from multi-tasking and take time to engage.

Even with all of these emerging trends and digital world, it’s important to be present in, and enjoy, the moment.

?