Big Trends in Marketing and Advertising

2021 is about to end, and it’s the perfect time to look at those marketing and advertising trends we are most likely to see in 2022.  As technology continues to grow at a rapid pace, understandably, some of these trends will be centred around technology.

• Personalised Marketing

For delighting customers with personalised messaging that helps them make a buying decision, the brand’s digital marketing team will coordinate with both the sales and customer service teams to deliver exceptional quality throughout the customer engagement experience.

• Employee Empowerment and Activation

Research indicates that close to 46% of a brand’s customers will stop using the brand if its employees do not possess enough brand knowledge, and their attitude is contradictory to what customers expect it to be. Marketers will become more lenient in giving them permission to post content on the brand’s digital channels about the company’s culture and other things.

• Story-Driven Content Based Engagement

In 2022, marketers will increasingly focus on better, more interesting and more engaging content with a story based format, for building frequency with their prospects and creating affinity for the brand and its premise. This activity will deliver the right mix of entertainment, information, and empowerment.

• Conversational marketing

Slowly but surely, automated Chatbots are taking over the sales and customer service functions, and seamlessly chatting with customers and prospects through instant messaging. By applying a combination of Natural Language Processing, or NLP, with Machine Learning, or ML, technology experts are getting Chatbots to mimic human behaviour in the conversation, thus making customers as comfortable in chatting with a machine rather as they would be with a human.

• Push Notifications

Today’s consumers are on their smartphone almost 24/7 and willingly accepting push notifications from the mobile apps, progressive web apps and websites of brands, particularly those in the e-commerce space.

• Featured Snippets in Google Search

In 2022, Featured Snippets will become an important part of Search Engine Optimization. These snippets feature prominently on the search result page and crisply answer the search query, with uniquely written to-the-point content sometimes formatted with bullet points.  This eliminates the need for the user to click through to the website for the answer, as has been the norm. Research states that over 60% of search results returned by Google are now featured snippets.

• Social Commerce

Brands will substantially increase their engagement with influencers relevant with their brand and prospects, and co-create interesting and informative content for delivering their brand proposition through the influencers, on their social media platforms, and gently taking their customers on the path to purchase.

• Responsible Consumerism

It is a fact that today’s consumers are comparatively more aware than before, of the effects their buying habits directly and indirectly have on the environment and society at large. Consumers are choosing their products and brands after ascertaining that by using them, they are in no way contributing to environmental degradation. Marketers will choose to produce or sell eco-friendly products and promote this aspect to their prospects, for increasing purchase affinity among consumers who have aligned their brand preferences along these lines.

• Hyper-Local Marketing

Location based marketing will reach a new high in 2022, with retail marketers adopting techniques like geofencing to deliver real time marketing messages to prospects who are within a certain range of the retail outlet.