Digital marketing and user preferences are constantly changing, some trends have just appeared, and some are moving from year to year and are only gaining momentum: instagram, automation, etc. And there are things that marketers should have forgotten about for a long time. We bring to your attention a list of anti-trends and trends in 2022.
Marketing anti-trends in 2022
1. Promotion through one platform
Using one promotion channel for advertising is inefficient and it’s time to remember this. Even if the site seems unsuitable, the product is not suitable for advertising through targeting, they can sell well with the help of retargeting. Therefore, you first need to think over a strategy, test several different advertising channels, choosing the most effective ones and refusing non-working ones. To choose promotion methods, you need to study the channels of competitors and your target audience and, of course, test them.
2. Sales in the forehead
Now there is a lot of competition in the market and the likelihood that they will buy goods from a company that they see for the first time is small. Users first study existing offers, find out where it is more profitable and safer to buy. So you need to think about how to win over a client: prepare a unique selling proposition, indicate your competitive advantages, build communication through additional points of contact: social networks, email marketing, retargeting, etc., try to solve his problem, and not just hand him a product .
3. Advertising blindly
When choosing the best advertising strategy, you can not do without analytics. Advertising blindly will not allow you to understand your mistakes. This is especially important in a highly competitive niche. No sales, and the advertising budget is wasted? It is possible that you have a lot of clicks and requests, but they are not targeted, spammy, or only for cheap products that are not so interesting. Then it’s time to learn how your business works.To track the effectiveness of advertising, it is important to use call-tracking, use CRM systems.
We’ve talked about some anti-trends and now let’s move on to what will be in demand.
Marketing Trends in 2022
1. Advertising automation
Automation is not a new technology, but right now it has become in demand. In the past, automated systems worked rather poorly and were more of a sign of an inexperienced professional with little skill to manually manage ads.
But technologies are improving, Google is introducing new automation tools and improving their quality. Machines are getting better at working with audiences and bids, doing competitive analysis and processing huge amounts of data. In addition, artificial intelligence is now beginning to explore creative areas: writing texts, editing videos.
Automatic systems help optimize ads, expand semantics, adjust bids, auto targeting by keywords, etc. Thus, manual control is increasingly relegated to the background. It is still too early to give advertising completely to automatic control, but now it is worth testing and connecting these systems more and more.
2. Video
Video formats are a 2021 trend that continues to gain momentum. Previously, social networks and contextual advertising were full of pictures, both ordinary and animated, but now video content appears everywhere. And as a result, advertising has moved to new platforms: TikTok, youtube, specialized thematic sites. Due to the popularity of videos on social networks, vertical videos have become especially in demand.In addition to video platforms, it has become important to use video in contextual advertising as a substrate for advertising. Short videos that demonstrate the product, how it works, and looks good work well. For example, advertising a bed, which shows how it unfolds.
3. TikTok
Since 2020, the popularity of TikTok has continued to grow. The site is not yet as promoted for advertising as Instagram, but continues to steadily gain momentum. In 2021, there are more marketing tools and, in general, TikTok is developing: Dynamic Product Ads (dynamic retargeting), Collection Ads, product cards.
There are more and more solvent audiences on TikTok, and advertising is cheaper than on Instagram. New ad formats, built-in video editors, lead forms, and the ability to integrate with third-party services appear on the site.
TikTok became so popular with its short videos that other sites tried to repeat its success: Instagram with Reels, YouTube with Shorts.
4. Instagram
The vogue of Instagram started about 5 years ago and it still persists. The site is being improved and takes into account trends. So, for example, it has the ability to publish reels – short videos, like in TikTok. Advertising through them is still much cheaper than in the same stories.
Every year, Instagram is becoming more convenient for online stores. Virtual storefronts are available, the ability to download product catalogs, and receive product cards. Through the cards, you can immediately find out the price and proceed to ordering products on the store’s website. But in the US, users can already order directly from Instagram.
5. Opting out of cookies
In June 2021, Google announced that it plans to stop using third-party cookies in the browser. This was done to protect personal data and transparency of advertising, because every year more and more people begin to worry about the confidentiality of their data and companies begin to meet them halfway.
This means that ads will become less personalized, and may lead to loss of views. After all, it was with the help of third-party cookies that marketers collected information about the interests of users and, based on this, set up targeted advertising.
You will have to come to terms with this trend and seriously plan how you can replace cookies. One of the solutions may be traditional contextual advertising, which, with the help of artificial intelligence technologies, can fall into the interests of the audience.
6. Marketplaces
Since the beginning of the pandemic, when all stores were closed, the popularity of marketplaces began to grow sharply and, despite the fact that some of the restrictions were lifted, online shopping has become commonplace and familiar to many. Consumers have more confidence in them than in unfamiliar individual online stores. Therefore, sometimes, rather than promoting a site and fighting popular marketplaces in the search results, it is more cost-effective to use them.
With the growing popularity of marketplaces, internal tools for promoting goods began to appear.
7. Cheating behavioral factors
It is worth mentioning the trends in SEO, and in particular the cheating of behavioral factors. Search engines use ranking factors to determine the sites that are most relevant to a query: link, text, commercial, behavioral, etc. Behavioral factors are a combination of indicators of the behavior of site users, on the basis of which search engines draw a conclusion about the quality of the site.
Behavioral factors cheating is an artificial improvement of these indicators with the help of bots or real people who perform the tasks of an SEO specialist for a small fee. The cheating of behavioral factors has traditionally been considered a “black” method of website optimization, which was not customary to talk about. But in 2021, people have become more tolerant towards him. Speakers at professional speeches began to openly say that they used and continue to use cheating, and talked about exactly how to do this without sanctions from search engines. There are more and more such revelations and data.
Conclusion
It is useful and necessary to follow trends, but you should not go to extremes and apply them all indiscriminately.Advertising needs to be thought through, tested and acted rationally. Some features may not suit your product, and the best advertising for it may be the use of an anti-trend. Test your hypotheses, don’t just use a trend checklist.