2022 is going to be an interesting year for marketers, as hopefully the covid-19 pandemic starts to at some point fade. Marketers dealt with immense disruption from the pandemic, both in the closure of in-person experiences, stores, restaurants, an increase in e-commerce activity, promoting and figuring out how to successfully implement curbside pickups, and the utter reduction in travel. All of these required shifts in marketing content, strategy, and ad spend.
Going forward the wild card will be additional covid variants requiring more stringent social distancing practices again, or simply the state of the overall economy changing how much consumers are buying.
By now, firms should be well versed in operating and marketing during the pandemic, with any pivots to maintain operations already well in effect and understood. For many brands, this is the advent of curbside service and a huge increase in eCommerce volume. The travel and event industries are also still in the early days of recovering, with each new variant delaying this process by months.
Here are a few trends and predictions we have for marketing in 2022.
More marketing channels
We’ve received numerous client requests to help them experiment and develop strategy and content for more marketing channels than before. Often this means more TikTok, Linkedin, youtube, and social media marketing, many times in the form of paid ads. We worked with literally dozens of clients in 2021 that wanted to diversify their paid marketing channels and run paid PPC on these sites, often preferring to run video ads in place of static ads. Overall, this strategy can help to widen the audience your brand is in front of, and develop a wider customer base.
More remote Jobs
Numerous employers are now providing work-from-home opportunities for their teams. This is here to stay, once people are used to working from home, for many, this is how they will prefer to work going forward or perhaps in a hybrid setting. It’s important for businesses to figure out how to operate efficiently with a distributed and remote team.
Even planning marketing content and strategies are now many times done remotely. While this can be a challenge, it’s also a great opportunity as you are able to put together the perfect team and work with vendors located across the country. Without a doubt, we’ve worked with more out-of-state clients than ever before in 2021.
A key ingredient to maintaining efficient operations in light of remote work is the use of technology and planning to keep your team organized and develop easy communication processes etc.
TV and Radio are here to stay
While much focus in marketing is an emphasis on digital channels, traditional TV through broadcast and cable, and then radio is without a doubt here to stay. For regional or local businesses, TV via local cable and broadcast channels remains a highly profitable means to grow your customer base and revenue.
Automotive Marketing shifts
The automotive industry has been fascinating over the last year and a half, in a situation where massive consumer demand is unable to be satiated by a lack of new car inventory resulting in cars being much more expensive than in previous years and the used car market getting much more pricy.
Auto dealership marketing practices have to adapt to this, as marketing new car offers such as lease rates and monthly payments, isn’t always effective since too little inventory exists and there is less price competition between dealers. Many of the dealerships we’ve worked have had great success advertising trade-in incentives, available home pickup for service and sales, and in general focusing less on individual pricing offers.
It’s hard to predict what will happen in 2022, hopefully, automotive inventory will be less of a problem, but for certain brands, it likely will be 2023 before dealerships are once again full of hundreds of new cars.
Websites have to perform and look good
There are still WAY too many websites that look awful and don’t work well whether on mobile or desktop. This is simply not acceptable. If you are serious about your business, you need to have a website that performs well on both desktop and mobile, it’s simply not an option to continue with poorly performing websites. Perspective customers will absolutely pick a competitor over you if your website makes your business look less than professional.
If you sell physical products, strongly consider developing an online store. They are easier than ever to build and give you the power to sell products quickly and easily. Even if you don’t want to use third-party fulfillment sites, you can still fulfill the orders via UPS, Fedex, or USPS yourself. Or even allow for store pick up at the time of online checkout.
Inventory and Sales
Many brands offered somewhat meager sales prices during black Friday/ holiday sales due to such a huge consumer demand and lack of inventory. It’s important to work with your supply chain planners now to forecast the type of inventory you will have in the coming year.
Being able to prepare and plan for sales a couple of months out is a huge advantage, but it requires having at least a pretty good idea of available inventory.
Start building a sales event calendar now, for the entire year. Sure things will change, but at least you have a model in place which will make the rest of the year that much easier to coordinate.
Learning from prior data
Now’s the time you should be reviewing your total numbers for 2021 and using them to tweak marketing and sales plans in 2022. Take a hard look at data from all your marketing channels, website numbers, then margins on products.
Learning from what worked and didn’t work is key to iterative business planning, and it’s something you take seriously.
Many smaller businesses tend to set and forget PPC campaigns, again, now’s the time you should be taking a hard look at overall performance and working with ad buying specialists to make any necessary changes required to increase campaign profitability for 2022.
Video Content is becoming the norm
It’s no secret that video content is simply more engaging than static ads. We’ve worked with numerous clients in 2021 to help them deploy video content in a variety of ways- whether through organic social media, website, email marketing, or paid channels like youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, tik tok ads.
Video campaigns nearly always perform better with higher ROI and lower cost of acquisition than static ad campaigns.
Trade show Marketing 2022
Hopefully trade shows can get back on track in 2022. Planning ahead is key with tradeshow marketing. You need a great-looking booth, and at least some type of rich media – this could be video or even VR. Build out your tentative trade show list now, and start outlining the audience and type of booth visitors that will be at each one. This should inform the customized content creation needed for each event.
VR Marketing in 2022
VR experiences are becoming more commonplace, both in the form of tradeshow experiences, AR apps, 360 videos and other applications.
If you want the most engaging type of marketing content available, virtual reality marketing experiences should be strongly considered. We’ve yet to see a trade show booth providing a VR experience that wasn’t surrounded by tons of booth visitors.
Want to improve your marketing in 2022?
How much does video marketing cost? – Take a look at our prior article.
Want to learn more about integrating video ads into your marketing channels – Get in touch!
