16 Digital Marketing Trends to Try in 2022

Try these Digital Marketing Ideas in 2022

As 2021 draws to an end, it is time to start planning your editorial calendar for 2022. While there is a lot of chatter about using AI technology to make marketing easier, many small-and-medium-sized companies find that technology cost-prohibitive. Instead of giving up on digital marketing, consider these techniques for 2022.

 

1. Mobile-friendly Websites

Your website needs to be responsive so that it displays appropriately on any device. Take a look at your website and see where you can reduce scrolling, pinching and panning. Create with a fluid grid instead of pixels. Make sure that all areas where you need users to input data are large enough so that people can efficiently complete the task. Set rules so that only the most essential information displays on smaller devices. Create rules so that images display correctly or not at all, depending on the device’s size.

If your website needs an overhaul to comply with mobile standards, we offer affordable website design plans for businesses small and large!

 

2. Local SEO/ Google Map Optimization

With Google’s latest algorithm changes, the company said that they consider user experience to be the most important factor when ranking websites. Therefore, you must ensure that your website loads quickly, provide the content they want and is easy to navigate.

Google My Business is a key to advertising for small-and-medium-sized businesses. Take advantage of the space to promote products that your customers are likely to want the most. Make the most of this space by filling your description with keywords your customers are likely to use. Post directly to Google My Business so that customers see your information directly on your listing, which can take up to 50$ of the SERP when someone enters your company name.

Optimizing for Google maps can be paramount to your success, so consider these tips.

  • A large percentage of your backlinks should come from high-quality business directories that people can easily access online.
  • Keep Google My Business fresh. You can have up to 10 pictures and photos on your Google My Business. Additionally, you can add a call to action directly from your listing.
  • Ensure all citations are up-to-date. Aim to have your business listed everywhere using the same company name, address and phone number.
  • Add rich snippets to your website’s content. Use the automatic rich snippet generator from Google to increase the space that your website listing gets on SERPS. This will also help Google put you in the correct category on Google maps.

3. Content Marketing

There is usually a bounce upwards after a website hits 100 posts, but after that point, longer posts are generally more effective than several smaller ones in promoting your company. Unless you are in a fast-paced industry, like entertainment or fashion, consider creating longer posts filled with great detail.

Long-form content is more likely to capture your audience’s attention. Furthermore, since it takes people longer to read them, it increases time spent on your site, which often increases how your website ranks in the SERPs.

You may want to consider creating:

  • How-to guides
  • Buyer guides
  • Tutorials
  • Resource lists
  • Industry definitions
  • Case studies

You may want to consider different formattings, like whitepapers, ebooks and blogs.

Long-form content can be very effective at building your voice as an industry leader. Viewers often see it as someone who understands their pain points because the longer form allows you to have room to offer a complete solution. Since people are happier with the content, they are more likely to share it with their friends and family. Longer content is also more likely to attract links that can be important in building your domain authority. Long-form content can increase conversion rates by up to 30%. It is effortless to repurpose long-form content for other purposes, like podcasts, presentations and webinars.

 

4. Online Reviews

While not a new trend, the importance of online reviews will continue to be big in 2022, you need to include customer testimonies on your site because it builds your reputation. You should always ask for reviews when your customer is likely to be the happiest with your product or service.

If you are not happy with the number of reviews that customers are leaving you, then:

  • Make sure that you have a process in place that makes it easy for customers to leave you a review.
  • Provide a template for reviews
  • Send a personalized email or message asking for the review.
  • Explain to loyal customers why you appreciate them leaving you a review

 

5. Google Features

In addition to Featured Snippets and Google My Business, there are other features that small-and-medium-sized companies may want to consider:

• Knowledge panels – These panels that look similar to Google My Business usually contain more details. They are often given to companies that provide good information in that listing and have established domain authority.

• Local pack – These three listings appear at the top of some SERP pages where the user is looking for a particular item, such as a restaurant, gas station or campground. Google selects these entities based on relevance, proximity and prominence.

• Top stories – You may be able to get your news stories published in this feature by submitting your RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos to Google’s Publisher Center.

•Video packs- These are usually YouTube videos. Increase the chances of Google choosing your video by using video Schema markup.

• Related questions – Watch when you enter your keywords into the SERP and see if a list of questions appears. Write good 40–50-word answers to those questions, and you may be able to win a featured snippet.

• Shopping Results – To have a product chosen by Google, make sure you have used Schema product markup and gotten lots of good reviews.

6. Conversational marketing

The pandemic has made many software companies lower prices on conversational marketing software, so it has become more available to smaller businesses.

While your conversion rate may have risen during 2021, stop and think about the customers that did not buy, although you gave them great information wrapped in a pretty package. Now, imagine that you had a way to reach those customers and answer their questions while they are considering your products. People naturally prefer two-way conversations, and conversational marketing makes that possible at a reasonable cost. Many companies have discovered that it has raised their conversions by up to 70%.

The second advantage of conversational marketing is that you can qualify leads easily. This makes your marketing much more agile so that your sales team reaches out quickly to the best prospects.

Conversational marketing also builds trust in your company. This is particularly important for new companies who are still trying to establish a loyal customer base.

Conversational marketing allows you to integrate potential customers who engage with your company into one platform, making your website, direct marketing efforts, and social marketing valuable. This allows to connect with more customers and lead them through the sales funnel at a lower cost.

7 . Video Marketing

Video marketing is not going anywhere, and it probably will not for the next 10 years. Therefore, if you are not already using this technique, you need to add it to your repertoire now. 90% of potential customers in a recent survey indicated they wanted to see videos before making a purchase. Another survey found that companies who used video marketing grew 49% faster than those who did not.

Video marketing is a great way to build brand awareness without spending a lot of money. You can host the video on YouTube, which is the second-largest search engine in the world. Then, embed it into your website or share it on your social media feed. Depending on the video, you may also be able to use only the audio as a podcast. It is easy to set up a television to play your videos in a loop if you do trade shows and other events.

Since about 65% of your target audience are visual learners, video makes it easy to capture their attention. Most people can recall visual content that they see three days later, which is much longer than written or audio content. Additionally, creating a video often makes it easy to teach your audience a difficult concept to explain when only using words.

The types of videos that you can produce are almost endless. You may want to consider:

  • Documentaries with your branding in front or at the end
  • Branded informational videos
  • Product demonstrations
  • Product promotions
  • Product launch videos
  • Crowd-funding videos
  • Animated explainer videos
  • Live feeds
  • User-generated videos
  • Stunt videos
  • Event videos
  • Infomercials
  • Customer testimonials
  • Product reviews
  • Unboxing videos
  • Behind-the-scene videos
  • Customer support videos
  • Frequently asked questions videos

8. Interactive Content

Interactive content is any content that relies on user input to deliver a helpful answer. Using this type of content can be a fabulous way to build engagement, capture more leads and create customer loyalty.

Interactive content is helpful at each step of the sales funnel. For example, at the top interactive quizzes are a perfect way to collect data on customers interested in your product to create other marketing that shows the viewer how your product meets their needs and where they need more education.

In the middle of the funnel, interactive content is excellent at helping the buyer make a buying decision by allowing them to enter specifics about their situation. Then, you can recommend your solution.

At the bottom of the funnel, 360-degree videos are a beautiful way to encourage buyers to go ahead and make the buying decision. You can also upsell during these videos by surrounding the product with useful accessories.

There are many types of interactive content that you may want to consider, including:

  • Interactive quizzes
  • Interactive infographics
  • 360-degree videos
  • Polls
  • Surveys
  • Calculators
  • Assessments
  • Ebooks
  • Emails
  • Webinars
  • Mobile apps
  • Mobile games
  • Troubleshooting tools
  • How-to guides
  • Interactive timelines
  • Augmented reality overlays

9. SERP Position Zero

Often called featured snippets, SERP Position Zero can get your website a lot of traffic. These snippets appear above the fold for many user search queries. While Google advises trying to optimize content for featured snippets, there are some tips you will want to keep in mind to try to capture this coveted position as featured snippets result in 35.1% of all clicks.

About 82% of all featured snippets are in paragraph form, and they usually incorporate a long-tail keyword. While Google will not tell its secret on exactly how it chooses website information to display, they take most featured snippets from websites already ranking high on those keywords in SERPs.

Create content that uses language that your customers use. Featured snippets are almost always well written and answer specific questions from your target audience. Most answers are between 40 and 50 words long. If you cannot adequately cover the answer in that length, consider creating a video as Google and other search engines often use them in SERP position zeros.

Especially if you are a newer company, you may want to think about using keywords with no feature snippet. A recent survey showed that the top search engine ranking on webpages where there was no feature snippet received 6% more hits than when a feature snippet was present.

10. Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce will continue to grow in 2022. In 2020, customers spent about $339.03 billion online, and consumers made over 50% of those purchases from a mobile device.

Think about the different payment methods that you are going to offer. In particular:

  • Choose a payment method designed to grow with your business.
  • Select a payment method that allows customers to pay quickly and securely to ensure that you leave your customers happy with their experience.
  • Consider fees charged by your payment processor and how you plan to handle those fees.
  • Pick a payment provider with clear analytics so that you can see how your customers are paying and other data.
  • Pick out a provider offering smooth and timely procedures for payouts, refunds, and disbursements.
  • Make sure that you can easily integrate the provider’s code into your website.

11. Alternative Search Engines

Newscasters and others have made a lot of noise in 2021 about big platforms controlling users too much and collecting data that they do not need, often without users’ permission. Therefore, you need to constantly be tracking which platforms your users are using.

Google has consistently lost market share to other search engines, but over 88% of all users continue to use this platform.

In June 2021, Bing received 1.08 billion unique monthly views. In the United States, Bing has over a 34% market share because it cooperated with Microsoft, and that share is growing. Advertising on Bing is very similar to Google Ads, but their agreements with Microsoft allow them to reach at least 66 million users that Google cannot reach.

There are many reasons that you may want to seek out alternatives to Google. The average small business spends about $8,500 per month on Google Ads, which is too much for many small businesses to handle. Additionally, the cost for each customer that clicks on your advertising can be over $50, and they average about $1.50.

12. Social Messaging

Experts predict that 60% of all customer engagements will happen through social messaging before the end of 2022. You cannot afford to lose those customers to your competitors who have embraced this technology. Social messaging is hugely successful because your customers are already using Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, and other platforms. Therefore, when you advertise through social messaging, you engage your customers where they are already comfortable.

Secondly, customers repeatedly say that they want speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service. Especially when you combine social messaging with chatbots, it is easy to deliver those elements to customers in wow moments that will quickly capture their attention.

Customers expect a personalized shopping experience, and it is easy to deliver that through social messaging. You can divide your customer list into different segments and send just the right message for where they are in the buyer’s journey and what products are most likely to capture their attention.

Successful marketing is never a one-way street. It is effortless to capture new insights about your customers through social messaging. This allows you to respond to negative feedback right away and helps you capture more sales when the customer is happiest with their most recent purchase.

Recent surveys show that customers expect to engage more with companies through social messaging in the future, and you cannot afford to get left behind.

13. Visual Search

Visual search allows users to capture an image and search for that product online using the image. Over 90% of the data received by the brain is visual, and you need part of those images to be yours.

Visual search is different than image search because the user enters an image without entering any text. Therefore, it is excellent for those marketing in areas where a picture speaks volumes, such as fashion, home décor and travel.

In a world that seems to be constantly going faster than ever, visual search allows users to find items online quicker. Researchers asked a group to find a particular item online. Those using text-based search found the item in two minutes and 31 seconds. Meanwhile, those who used visual search found the item in 37 seconds.

Additionally, marketing with visual search is a fantastic way to sell more to customers. Imagine that your potential customer has found an outfit online that they love. When each item can be visually searched, you can sell them the pants, shoes, tops and accessories. Then, imagine that customer loves everything about the item, but the shoes. You can easily use images on your website to show them different shoes that look great with the outfit.

A massive benefit of visual search is that you can use programs to create tags for you. You no longer have to spend hours trying to decide what words a potential customer would use to describe that item because the program does it automatically for you. This is a huge benefit when it comes to SEO and having the right keywords on your site.

14. Social Media Stories

Over 1 billion people see stories daily on Facebook-controlled platforms alone. Furthermore, people are more likely to swipe or click on links included in stories than on links contained in traditional social media. You have probably seen these stories on apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.

There are many benefits of using social media stories, including:

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Creating more engagement with your followers
  • Cost-effective advertising
  • Increase traffic to webpages
  • Reach a younger target audience

15. Social Commerce

Instagram and Tik Tok are changing the world of social commerce in a big way, and it is likely to become even more significant in 2022. Over 4.48 billion people use social media, and that number has more than doubled in the last six years. Most users are active on at least six different platforms. Find success by positioning your company where your target audience is online. Almost 50% of people in the world use social media.

Secondly, social commerce is a fantastic way to increase your SEO efforts. While there is some debate about the exact numbers, the more you can get people to engage with your social media accounts, the higher your site will rank on search engines if all other things are equal.

Social commerce is a powerful branding tool. You will get authentic engagement that will keep your company at the forefront of people’s minds. Therefore, even if they never place an order when their friends are looking for the products they sell, you are likely to be the first company to pop into their minds.

Social commerce also gives you a platform to build customer trust. As people watch you interact with people who leave comments, they will form a positive impression of your company. This can be key to getting customers to place larger orders.

16. Geotargeting

You may have come out of a business and received a short message promoting a nearby business. This technology, usually based on radio-frequency, can be a great way to encourage people to take a specific action that you want them to take, such as visiting your physical location. While this technology has been around for a while, there are new uses for it worth considering.

You will want to keep in mind several points if you are going to try location-based advertising.

A larger geotarget will cost you more money than a smaller one, but more people may see your advertising. Try setting up several smaller geotargets within 5 minutes of your physical location.

Craft messages that connect with your target audience. Just because someone is in a particular location does not necessarily mean your products will interest them, so you need to create messages that connect with customers.

Your message should give those receiving it a reason to come in. You may want to offer a small discount or a free item if a person responds to your geofence marketing. Of course, you need a compelling call-to-action telling your audience exactly what you want them to do.

Using different types of geofencing helps ensure that you reach the maximum number of people in your target audience. You may want to set your geofencing to only display during a specific time of day or when the user completes a particular behavior. You can also set geofences to show to all people who visit a specific website. This makes them very useful for retargeting customers who have already visited your website or physical location.

 

Setting Your Digital Marketing Goals for 2022

Now that you understand the trends, it is time to set your marketing goals for 2022. To get you thinking in the right direction, consider putting a goal for the year in each of these categories and working on them regularly throughout the year.

As with all goals, they should be SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. Then, rate your progress regularly.

  • Mobile-friendly websites
  • SEO
  • Local SEO/Google Maps Optimization
  • Online Reviews
  • Content Marketing
  • SERP Position Zero
  • Alternative Search Engines
  • Mobile Commerce
  • Conversational marketing
  • Chatbots
  • Video Marketing
  • Social Messaging
  • Visual Search
  • Social Commerce
  • Interactive Content
  • Geotargeting

Now that you have your marketing goals in place for 2022, you may feel overwhelmed and wonder how you will accomplish all that you need to before the end of the year. Let us help you meet your digital marketing goals in 2022.

 

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