Top Digital Marketing Trends In 2022

Every year, we are always eager to see how organizations are planning to utilize their marketing resources in the coming year. While you could say we have a vested interest in those plans (guilty as charged), we also find it helpful for thinking about where to prioritize our own resources when building strategies for 2022.

Marketing Budgets Are Growing

Organizations of all sizes are relying on marketing efforts to generate additional leads, improve customer satisfaction, and increase brand awareness. That’s why they’re investing more money than ever before on areas like automation tools, content creation, and marketing software. HubSpot’s research found that 63% of marketers saw their budget increase in 2021. Companies also expanded the scope of marketing to foster better relationships with their customers to improve retention and deliver a better overall experience across every touchpoint.

Automation Is Increasingly a “Must Have” Feature

While software tools have long made it possible to automate various marketing campaigns and tasks, they are fast becoming the standard approach rather than an optional one. In 2021, three quarters of companies reported using marketing automation software for task management, content delivery, and chat bots. Of the companies that had yet to adopt automation tools, 26% planned to do so throughout the course of the year.

Social Media Remains a Major Focus

Nearly 70% of organizations identified social media as their primary marketing focus. Throughout 2021, a majority of them also used social listening as the primary tactic for engaging with social media channels. Social listening is a relatively new approach marketers use to understand how people feel about a particular brand. Rather than simply tracking engagement data, social listening provides insights and alerts that allow social media marketers to quickly spot conversations and events that could potentially impact customer sentiment. According to HubSpot’s report, 62% of companies using social media are already implementing social listening to inform their strategy.

Content Is (Still) King

While we’re referencing long time marketing clichés, we might as well talk about the ongoing importance of content generation. In a nutshell, content still matters. A lot. Video, blogs, and infographics were the top three types of content deployed in 2021, with 82% of companies reported actively using content marketing. That was a 12% increase from the previous year, and 28% of respondents planned to invest in new content throughout 2021. It’s a good reminder that for all the emphasis placed on automation and optimization, successful marketing depends upon quality content to stand out from the competition.

SEO Continues to Make a Difference

Search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved significantly over the last decade. Where SEO specialists once spent all their time stuffing website content with keywords, refinements to search engine algorithms have prompted marketers to focus on creating more tailored website experiences. The use of strategic keywords is still important, but localization, website performance, and mobile device optimization have become just as crucial to helping connect users to the content and services they’re searching for.