On a large scale, digital marketing has not changed much in 2022. You want your website to rank well, you want to have an interesting social media presence, you want to dominate the local competition for your respective niche or industry, and you want to look into the benefits of promoting and selling your products or services through ecommerce.
But on a more granular level, businesses should beware of the way the landscape is changing to favor online and offline interaction, a shift in SEO strategy towards prioritizing UX, better integration for ecommerce platforms on search engines and search ad campaigns, as well as the near-future battlefields of augmented and virtual reality through concrete new features like the AR try-on feature on Instagram and multiple ecommerce platforms, and the looming Metaverse. Let’s take a look at some of the most bang-for-your-buck digital marketing trends in 2022.
What Determines Profitability?
When we say, “maximize profit”, we’re talking about digital marketing trends that translate as directly as possible into more leads, and more sales. The presupposition whenever you’re investing in digital marketing is that your product or service isn’t just good, it’s great.
Digital marketing doesn’t fix or change the way your offering works. It simply addressed the common problem many businesses, particularly smaller businesses, face today: they’re drowning in a sea of online and offline competitors, unable to stand out in a crowd and get people to pay attention.
If your product or service is robust and well worth the price, good marketing will be able to turn interested onlookers and eager visitors into paying (and hopefully repeating!) customers. To that end, these trends should still be your top priorities when aiming to gather leads and convert them into sales.
Why Search Is Still a Priority
Search engines, particularly Google, continue to be a cornerstone in the daily use of nearly every Internet user. Need to know something? Just “google it”!
Google dominates search, with a market share of 85 percent on desktop. Mobile is a landscape in and of itself, and a growing one at that – since 2019, more than half of all web traffic in the world comes from mobile users. In the US alone, Google enjoys a 89 percent share of the mobile search market.
But the way into Google’s heart has changed over the years. It used to be that there were “white-hat” and “black-hat” methods for worming one’s way to the top search results for any given target query. But Google continues to update the way search works on a daily basis, to the point where there are well over a thousand annual changes made to Google’s search algorithm in any given year.
While we might not know the exact inner workings of how algorithms like Bing and Google work, we do have a very good idea. To that end, SEO remains central to good digital marketing. Want to draw in more traffic? Then improve your search rankings and draw in the crowd that your data tells you is most likely to buy into your product or service!
To that end, keyword research is also becoming more and more important. Rather than just try to rank for industry-relevant search terms, it’s important to invest your money in keywords that your most important customers are more likely to use.
It’s About Good User Experiences
SEO in recent years has shifted towards making websites accountable for having a good user experience on both desktop and mobile – especially mobile. As the global share of web traffic tipped towards mobile in 2019, search engines like Google and Bing want companies and individuals to pay closer attention to the way their content scales and presents itself across all important screen resolutions and aspect ratios.
Email Going Strong
We’re living in the year 2022, but email marketing remains an important part of a solid digital marketing strategy. However, it’s also easy to waste both your time and your money investing in an email campaign with poor results.
The key? You need to make sure your leads are interested before you include them in your mailing lists and promo offers. Exclusivity is the name of the game. Instead of trying to farm emails to spam, email campaigns become more valuable (and are less penalized) if your recipients regularly open your messages and check their contents.
Social Media (Still) Matters
Yes, yes, we’ve all heard that Facebook is dead, but it and other social media networks continue to provide a list of growing features, and a steadily growing user base. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have expressed continued interest in implementing in-house ecommerce features for businesses, and expanding their usability for companies through business-specific perks like item listings and customer chats.
In addition to these newer features, social media still remains one of the easiest ways to gather customer feedback, directly engage with customer complaints, highlight positive customer experiences, and give your business a personal online touch.
The Metaverse Is Young
One of the biggest changes in the world of big tech was Facebook’s name change, and pivot towards the future of virtual reality. The Metaverse is still more of a concept than a working online community, but these things tend to grow at exponential speeds nowadays – meaning early investment is both prudent, and important.
But don’t expect a significant ROI just yet. There are more than a few detractors of the idea of a Meta-centric Metaverse, and they might not be wrong. While the idea of the metaverse is both inevitable and has already been existing for years, the marketing potential for these environments isn’t quite clear yet.
Remember the 80-20 Rule
While this list looks suspiciously like a list that could apply to 2021, or nearly any other of the last five years (save for the inclusion of Meta’s new project), the most successful digital marketing trends are generally evergreen. Digital marketing, and your overall online business strategy, should always keep in mind the 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle – to sum it up, 80 percent of all outcomes are the result of 20 percent of all causes in a business or event.
Trend chasing is not a viable business strategy if your fundamentals are poor. Sticking to your guns and improving the areas in which your business can stand to gain the most – such as beating the competition in local searches, coming up first on social media, growing your platform through offline interactions with your customers, and getting your name out there organically by creating experiences that are worth the word-of-mouth needed to break past the barrier every small business faces – will be your best bet at seeing a real profit from your everyday online input.
However, it’s all easier said than done. Digital marketing can be a minefield for the uninitiated. It’s easy to walk into your first SEO campaign and waste money trying fruitlessly to promote your website through “tricks”, or dump cash into a pay-per-click ad campaign while your site remains unoptimized and thin on meaningful content or useful information. Knowing what trends to keep in mind helps, but you need a concrete plan of action to string this information together and turn it into a steady stream of real leads and sales.
