5 Marketing Trends to Know in 2022

The last few years have thrown marketers for a loop, forcing them to adapt their strategies to new remote work, digital ecosystems. As they prepare for 2022, many are looking for new ways to help them reach customers in innovative ways and drive growth.

The good news is that there are more ways than ever to reach those customers in our increasingly digital world — new social media channels, virtual events, voice technology, virtual reality, and more. There are also more tools for marketers to leverage to help hone their strategies, from data to artificial intelligence.

However, no company can do it all, and marketing leaders need to make strategic decisions about what investments make the most sense for their business in 2022.

Here are five areas to consider as they build out those strategies.

Leveraging digital transformation. Like many parts of the business, marketing has been undergoing a digital transformation. For marketing, that can mean exploring more digital channels like social media, but it can also mean improving processes and campaigns to be more data-driven and leveraging tools such as Google Analytics, A/B testing, and customer data platforms for increased success.

Hybrid events. Over the past two years, the in-person events that were the mainstay of many marketing budgets were forced to transition to a new virtual world. Now, as the pandemic begins to slow in many regions, many in-person events are beginning to restart. However, many savvy marketers have realized that virtual events brought many new benefits, such as ease of reaching customers across geographies and lower costs. As we advance, SMBs will want to determine which platforms make the most sense to reach certain customers across virtual and in-person platforms.

Content is king. In our digital world, content is more important than ever. Marketing organizations will likely need to create more content (and quality content!) than ever before in 2022. Organizations may also need to evaluate new forms of content, such as virtual reality, voice, podcasts, and more, rising in popularity.

On top of that, CMOs and other marketing leaders will want to ensure that each of these pieces of content gets the most bang for its buck by closely aligning thought leadership, SEO, and public relations outreach, as well as implementing more personalization techniques to tailor it to each customer by leveraging data, CRM platforms and more.

Leveraging automation and AI. In 2022, marketing teams will have the power of great automation and artificial intelligence technology at their fingertips. They can use this across their strategy, including analytics for qualifying leads, monitoring performance for Influencer marketing, email automation, and more. These techniques can help save marketers time and help them make more informed and successful decisions.

Social media expansion. The digital and social media landscape is shifting, with new platforms rising and grabbing the attention of potential customers, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and more. Smart marketers will want to make sure they are adding these platforms into their overall social media outreach strategies and reallocating their budgets to invest differently as their customers shift.

While we’re not quite yet in 2022, the time to start thinking about many of these strategies is now. SMB marketing leaders should meet with their teams sooner rather than later to figure out what marketing trends they think could add value to their business and begin planning for how they could implement them in the year to come.