Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends in 2022 to Plan for Marketing Now
1 Dec , 2021
2021 is a turning point for all of us. Covid-19 has completely flipped over the business sectors that almost none of the industries is seen without acceleration in digital transformation and complete change in consumer behaviour. As we enter the fall season, marketers should start strategizing for an easier and successful 2022! Let the past be the past and get well prepared with our outlook for the 2022 digital marketing trends:
Contextual Marketing Is Back in 2022
More Video Marketing Strategies to Come in 2022
Emerging Social Audio Marketing in 2022
Gear Up for AI-driven Digital Marketing in 2022
Socially Responsible Marketing Is Rising, Yet Not Easy
Time to Increase Mobile Marketing budget in 2022
Win with Personalized Marketing in 2022
1. Contextual Marketing Is Back to the Digital Marketing Game in 2022
It is nothing new that we get ads of our favourable items almost like wherever we go online. Widely used by advertisers, third-party cookies can retarget users with personalized ad content. Its powerfulness is revealed by the cross-site tracking data of user behaviour to display as many relevant ads to the user as possible. But the new era has arrived along with the increasing privacy concern: both Google and Apple have made it explicit that third-party cookies will be phasing out in different ways. Noticing the worries towards the impact of cookie blocking in the market, we are here to calm your anxiety as digital marketing is a world of versatility — contextual marketing is your way out!
Before the “addiction” to third-party cookies, the digital advertising industry relied on contextual marketing which targets users based on the keywords they are searching for. For example, ads for a PPC optimization tool on a digital marketing insight article. You can imagine the ads shown are much more related to the users’ current needs and obviously, less haunting than cookie-based ads that follow you around! Following the demise of third-party cookies, the marketing industry is shifting the focus to conventional contextual marketing which also means SEO optimized content matters. By creating dynamic content and maintaining the relevancy of the landing page to your campaign, it is optimistic that your ads will attract the audience with existing intent and boost quality conversions.
Without doubt, the loss of third-party cookies is a disruption to marketers. However, it is also sending us back to the basics where content is the king, arousing the audience interest and effective engagement. In a long-term perspective, the traffic-driving result will last for years in return for your time and effort put in on long-tail content creation.
2. More Video Marketing Strategies to Come in 2022
Video marketing continues to grow and remains as one of the 2022 digital marketing trends with its absolute impact in both of our life and the marketing sector. Considering the ongoing video function updates across platforms, you can easily get a video marketing format to stand out from the competitive market!
Last year, Instagram has announced “Reels” for creating short, entertaining videos. Similar to Douyin or TikTok videos, Reels are created with music and effects in addition to its 15 to 60-second stack of clips, and are posted on Instagram Stories, Explore Feed and the Reels tab on user profile. Since its launch, the feature has expanded to 50-plus countries and resulted in impressive usage statistics.
For example, Louis Vuitton has an average of 7 million views for each of its viral Reels, promoting new collections with creative and aesthetic videos. In a global landscape, research held by Deposit Photos shows that 69% respondents prefer watching short videos. Although Instagram Reels is not opened to Hong Kong users yet, it is highly expected that once the feature is introduced here, it will lead to a great behavioural change on social media and hence adjustment on local digital marketing strategies. At the moment, what we can be sure about is the new leading position of short videos in video marketing strategies worldwide!
Another video strategy included in 2022 digital marketing trends is ephemeral content which only lasts for 24 hours. Recall your memory when we were nerve-racking to make sure we have saved the Snapchat messages and kept checking on Snapchat Stories before they disappeared?Found as well on Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Snapchat Stories and LinkedIn Stories, ephemeral content has already been popular amongst users over the years. However, brands have begun strategically utilizing it for product promotion, brand’s inside look and Influencer takeover these days due to the rising effect of FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out.
Flooded with the tremendous information from social media, consumers’ attention span is short these days, meaning you have to remind them that time is running out, shop now! The ephemeral content on social media therefore often requires a strong, prompting call-to-action (CTA) and redirect users to your shoppable page to boost sales right away. Not much ideas on Stories content? Our social media marketing professionals can help you with that!
3. Emerging Social Audio Marketing in 2022
When LinkedIn is also meddling in the audio feature competition, you know social audio marketing is going to be an important 2022 digital marketing trend.
Social media, commonly known in text, image and video formats, is now welcoming the new member: social audio. It is differentiated from the pre-recorded podcast audio by its real-time and interactive characteristic. One of the leading figures, Clubhouse, has chosen the right time to introduce this audio-based app to the market and spiked in popularity early this year when the pandemic hits the world. Brands and basically all the prominent key opinion leaders (KOLs) of different niches hopped on the app to initiate borderless, live conversations. In one year of time, Clubhouse has gained 10 million weekly active users with 4-billion market value. Just when we thought it is a fad, Facebook and even LinkedIn announced to roll out their social audio features sooner or later, not to forget the existing social audio platforms like Twitter Spaces and Spotify Greenroom.
You might be wondering how to apply it to your brand’s digital marketing strategies. Well, it is true that most social media platforms are still in the development stage of social audio features. Therefore, at present, social audio marketing may only be suitable if your brand has a renowned representative to host the social audio and bring the biggest audiences. For small businesses, it is still necessary to keep it in mind and get the insights from the trend instead!
First, leverage KOL marketing in Social Audio Marketing to reach more potential consumers. It is always one of the best digital marketing strategies to grow your business in the virtual world with the KOL’s existing fanbase. Second, we suggest looking for digital marketing strategies that focus on interacting and building connection with the audience. Social audio is on the rise and expected to be impactful due to its exclusive bonding effect provided by the live conversation. You can tell the traditional one-way broadcast medium is no longer enough for the audience to get relevant with the business in this digital-first world.
4. Gear Up for AI-driven Digital Marketing in 2022
Some advertisers are still underestimating the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact in digital marketing today. The technology is not only shown in automated data collection and analysis as we all know of, but most importantly, to greatly enhance and bring our digital marketing campaigns to the next level.
As stated in Statista’s report, 41% of the respondents are using AI-driven advertising tools with notable growth in sales and 38% of them believes that AI helps creating personalized shopping experience to the consumers. Furthermore, AI is involved in almost all digital marketing platforms. Based on algorithms and machine learning, users are distributed with content that they are most likely to be attracted to and triggered to take action on the ads. Although there are still many moments that require human intervention, the future of every industry is still expected to be ruled by AI in a large extent to lower cost and increase accuracy.
Besides the widely-used Google advertising, there are still plenty of AI-driven advertising tools in the market that can effectively improve your digital marketing performance. For instance, AsiaPac offers two AI-driven solutions — OptAdEasy and KOOLER AI. OptAdEasy helps with your paid-per-Click (PPC) Management with effortless campaign optimization suggestions that save your time and empower your decision making. For KOOLER AI, it is the first AI-driven influencer management platform in Asia with 200K+ influencers across 15+ industries in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand and other countries. Without effort wasted, you can find the most suitable KOLs with the facial and product recognition tools, manage a KOL marketing campaign and have automated reporting all using KOOLER AI. Work smarter, not harder in 2022!
5. Socially Responsible Marketing Is Rising, Yet Not Easy
From environmental awareness to human rights, the society has increasing concern over the public issues over the past year. Purchasing decisions no longer depend merely on the goods and services themselves, but are also affected by the brand image, whether it is resonating with the consumers’ core values and deliver a positive impact on their wellbeing. The phenomenon calls for socially responsible marketing practices which shows the company’s accountability towards the social, environmental and other aspects.
Same as other digital marketing strategies, socially responsible marketing requires much preparation work and even more careful planning. If you don’t pay attention to the demand from your conscious consumers, you might start losing them to the competitors that do. For example, cosmetics consumers care about source of natural ingredients and if it is animal-tested; apparel consumers start choosing brand with eco-friendly materials and humane working conditions. Bet you already think of several socially responsible brands like Patagonia and Levi Strauss!
However, Oatly’s situation is a whole lot different that it is under a few controversies. For years of promoting the positive impact of plant-based milk to the environment, Oatly accepted an investment from Blackstone which is deemed to be against environmental and housing crisis. The issue further triggered other critiques such as the oat milk’s ingredients whether it is as “made for humans” as it says on its ads, and its water consumption. Like what Oatly does, more and more brands are positioning themselves as sustainable businesses. For sure, you cannot perform socially responsible marketing without transparency as the fundamental component. But you can see from its case that, cherry picking information as marketing context perhaps will do more harm than good to your brand image. Learning from others’ mistakes, upholding ethics as the core of your socially responsible marketing, be truthful to your audience instead of meaningless greenwashing to cultivate a loyal customer base.
6. Time to Increase Mobile Marketing budget in 2022
It is no secret that mobile is the popular device for digital advertising placement. But shoved by the outbreak of the COVID-19 last year, marketers have valued mobile marketing way more than the past and so should you in 2022 digital marketing!
The new normal has spearheaded the shift of media buying along with more people relying on mobile apps for remote entertainment, works and daily chores, especially in Asia Pacific region. According to AppsFlyer’s report, the annual Global App Install Ad Spend has risen from $57.8 billion in 2019 to $96.5 billion in 2021, which is a 67% of increase in two years. Asia Pacific, occupying over half of the total app install ad spend, continues to command with the giant market, China, and other rapid-growing Southeast Asia countries like India and Indonesia. Given the fact is that there is still a big portion of unconnected users in Asian developing countries, but with their rapid development in recent years, we definitely expect to see an acceleration of mobile users and thus app installs by 2022.
Besides, the use of programmatic in-app advertising has been increasing with more sophisticated solutions and inventories. No matter which industry you are from, your ads can be automatically distributed on the related apps and reach the right audience with real-time and location targeting. Click here to know more about our programmatic advertising service!
On the consumer side, they are opting for more convenience and seamless online shopping experience — an app! Online store on website is not enough nowadays. App Annie, a mobile performance suite, shared its positive stance on mobile retail boom with the evidence of 49% increase in global time spent in shopping apps and $88 spent every time on the shopping app in 2021. Many retailers have launched their app including loyalty programs to reach new potential buyers and employ an omni-channel shopping experience, such as IKEA and Marks & Spencer (M&S).
If you do not have the budget to create an app at the moment, social commerce is another great option for your 2022 digital marketing strategies! Most of the widely-used social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) supports in-app shopping which can definitely improve your online shopping service by linking up the entire purchase journey from product discovery, research, communication to payment. Without further explanation, we believe you realize the need to increase your mobile marketing budget in the coming year.
7. Win with Personalized Marketing in 2022
Back to our first point in the article, targeting based on third-party cookies will be halted soon. Meanwhile, two-third of consumers will stick to the brand for their personalized experience as stated in Emarsys’ recent report. To meet the changing customer needs and win in the competitive commerce market, personalized marketing is the last 2022 digital marketing strategy you should consider implementing.
Personalized marketing, in other words, means one-to-one digital marketing. Country Director DACH at Criteo, Corinna Hohenleitner, shared her words towards the future commerce, “We see that commerce is in pole position for personalized advertising. It has a closeness to consumer needs other industries can only dream of.” Based on the first-party data collected via brands’ individual media channels such as official website and newsletter emails, the commerce sectors can get the most direct and favourable consumer behaviour to work on targeting strategies.
With the emergence of new audience groups and new competitors into the market all at once, on one side, first-party data can help business to classify the new potential customers and their individual needs clearly. On the other hand, consumers, who are facing multiple options in the market, will easily shift from your brand to another and lose you in the noise. To increase customer retention, personalized marketing becomes inevitable to attract them with the most relevant content and connect with them in a personal level. In contrast, consumers may even report irrelevant marketing content represented by the 93% respondents in Emarsys’ report.
Example is shown by Insider’s various personalized email newsletters. The global news publication utilizes email marketing strategy to drive traffic and collect first-data such as past website interactions and email response rates. It further provides the first-party data to publishers on its own channel for vertical content creation. In this way, subscribers get the most personalized content and build strong loyalty towards Insider, which has significantly increased its auto-renewals. The power of first-party data in personalized marketing is unquestionable. It is the time to start harnessing the potential of this digital marketing strategy in 2022.
Summary
What worked in the past may not work for your 2022 digital marketing strategies, particularly when we are still in a year full of changes. Don’t get overwhelmed by the future uncertainty or the 7 digital marketing trends we suggested in the article. It is because AsiaPac has the best team of experienced Asia digital marketing experts who provide the most digital marketing solutions to cater your needs. Click here to get a free proposal now!
About AsiaPac Net Media
With an extensive digital marketing experience of serving more than 2,500 clients across Asia in sectors such as ecommerce, finance, gaming, travel, retail, beauty, FMCG, education, health products, AsiaPac’s expert team is highly recognized for the excellence in providing performance-driven services to businesses across Asia, and global corporates targeting Asia markets. If you’d like to learn more about AsiaPac and the work we’ve done, visit our Case page. For more information on AsiaPac/ AdTech and our services, please contact us at info@asiapac.com.hk /info@adtechinno.com.
