The “one size fits all” has seriously been disrupted a long age due to the evolution of digital engagement with audience.
Target groups are also more attracted to brands who create engagement at various levels. And when it comes to customer’s engagement designed to capture customer’s attention at even personal level, those brands who will follow such trends are going to rock in 2022.
Let us discuss the top 5 digital marketing trends that you need to know in 2022.
1. Hybrid Events
The critical nature of COVID-19 pandemic has made virtual events the mainstay for continuing to engage with customers and leads.
What say?
Post pandemic, now gradually people are a bit comfortable with physical gatherings, digital marketers face a choice.
Should they return to events that take place only within a physical location? Or, should stay virtual to appease those consumers who enjoyed attending live events from the comfort of their homes?
The best answer is to implement a hybrid approach. When planning events for 2022, make sure your live events have a strong digital component and utilize advanced digital marketing technologies like AR and VR, co-browsing, video chat to create an immersive experience for those who wish to attend digitally.
2. Use of Gamification
Gamification is an emerging digital marketing trend that includes game features into a website.
Leveraging the trend to your marketing strategy will help to make games engaging, addictive, and fun. It helps businesses to increase customer loyalty, brand awareness, and sales conversions.
Delivering a captivating gamification experience can capture player’s emotions and easily showcase the best activities an audience can complete that will further impact the mutually shared goals.
According to Review42 research on voice search, “55% of teenagers use voice search every day.” It is actually a massive adoption by the entire generation shows how popular voice search is going to get in the future.
There are a couple of reasons why Voice Search:
Firstly, the increasing adoption of smart speakers. 20% of the households have bought a smart speaker such as Amazon Alexa or Google Home. The adoption of devices that are fully voice search controlled is a big indicator of how people have started to get accustomed to this new behavior.
Secondly, Google has achieved 95% accuracy with their Voice Search. With higher precision of search, the ease of use factor for voice search has become the top digital marketing trend. Now with better accuracy to match what you ask for, and the ease of using your voice to get results makes the process personalized and attractive.
Thirdly and most importantly, it is projected that by 2022, 50% of all online shopping will be conducted through voice results. It is a whopping $40 billion opportunity for digital marketers to exploit.
As the growth factors indicate the rise of voice search, making your website ready for voice search will be very essential for the future.
4. Increasing Page Speed
A slow-loading page is the topmost reason why users leave any website if the loading time is within a minute of landing on the page.
Even a second or two of a delay in how the page loads can negatively impact your website conversion rate.
But the good news is you can speed up your page load times pretty easily:
Optimize the images
Make sure there are no large image files. If there are, compress them to where they are less than 100KB.
Reduce the number of internal redirects, specifically redirect chains that go through several redirects before landing on the correct URL and internal links to redirects.
Reducing the internal redirects can speed up your domain authority (DA) in Google and your page load speeds.
5. Provide User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) is one of the digital marketing trends that will stay.
UGC can simply be a user review on a product on your e-commerce site, a comment on a blog article, or a Q&A section where people can ask questions and get the answers they need.
How does it help?
It helps build trust with your audience.
It can help increase your brand’s search rankings, credibility, and overall engagement.
Over 80% of consumer’s purchase decisions are influenced by social media posts.
By leveraging your fans’ content you can create meaningful relationships that foster long-term engagement.
Look for such content by searching your brand on social channels or asking for users to participate and provide content through hashtags. When appropriately moderated, user-generated content can be a powerful tool for your website both for SEO and for user experience.
The New Year 2022 has brought certain fundamental changes to the way we market. The death of the cookie is a big deal to the digital advertising that many businesses have been heavily relying on until now. Continue to experiment, measure, and ensure that you are considering new technology.
By Sudhanshu Malik, Founder of Stealeads.com