Marketing and its trends move at the speed of light. At least it feels that way when you’re brainstorming a new campaign or strategy, and all of a sudden, a new statistic or technology release changes everything. New trends and techniques pop up so often and they change the way we attract, connect with, and market to our audiences.
To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world, it is important to stay ahead of the game. In this article, you will learn the importance of following trends, the current trends in 2021, and the future of content marketing trends.
Table of Contents
Importance of Following Marketing Trends
Successful entrepreneurs know how to follow the most significant trends in the scope of their businesses. Some people create trends, and then others understand the trends. The industry and market are ever-changing over time, and businesses will need to change themselves over time. It has never been more important to follow the trends of your business.
Better Forecasting
Forecasting is an everyday job for an entrepreneur and marketer. If you understand trends, the prediction will be better and easier for you. You can work on the predictions only if you follow trends that are related to your company or business.
Knowing What Will Happen
Current trends can tell you something about the future. If you look at historical data, you can easily see some trends. If you see them and combine this knowledge with other environmental factors, you will not only know what is happening now but what might happen tomorrow.
Be a Leader, Not a Follower
Following trends and implementing them into your business or company can make you a leader, not a follower. Maybe in the future, you and your business will make the trends. This is important for your small business if you always want to be one step ahead of competitors. Leaders create market conditions.
Better Business Ideas
Knowing the trends will help you have better ideas for your business. There are many hidden business ideas that your can use for your small business inside trends. If you follow the trends around your company, you will become an entrepreneur who is always full of ideas that can be used to improve and grow your business.
2022 Content Marketing Trends
We live in a time when technology marketing moves fast and consumer interests and behaviors are hard to predict. Marketers can no longer throw something out there and hope that educated guesses and the same old methods will work forever.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising means using A.I. to automate ad buying so you can target more specific audiences. For example, real-time bidding is a type of programmatic ad buying. This automation is faster and more efficient, which means higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.
Conversational Marketing
The reality of modern marketing has become clear: it’s more conversational. Consumers want it that way, so brands are reacting. When consumers have a question, they want an immediate response.
Conversational marketing facilitates a one-to-one, real-time connection between marketers and consumers. Unlike traditional strategies, this form of marketing is now available across multiple channels, allowing brands to meet customers on their terms: on the devices, platform, and time schedules that suit the consumer best.
The primary goal of conversational marketing is to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that fosters higher engagement and greater loyalty.
Personalization
If you and your business want to stand out in 2021, you need to personalize your marketing. This means personalized content, products, emails, and more. When you want to study examples of the power of personalization, it’s hard to overlook Netflix and Amazon, both of whom have tailored recommended products or movie titles.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the most important marketing trends today and will likely be for the next decade. There are plenty of ways to drive higher engagement with video marketing, including making a video post or starting a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
One of the best things about video marketing is that it makes it easy to reformat your content. You can record a video for YouTube, but you can also transcribe that video and put the transcription on your blog under an embedded YouTube video. With video marketing, the opportunities are endless.
Emerging Content Marketing Trends
After going through a year-long (and counting) pandemic, marketing trends have continued to adapt and change to the environment. In the past year, marketers have had to roll with the abrupt suspension of in-person events, which has led to a massive shift towards digital marketing and reduced budgets. As the economic recovery gains momentum, marketers will find themselves with more money to spend and figuring out where to spend it. Here are some trends to look for in 2022.
Future of Events Will Be Hybrid
When the pandemic forced closures and social distancing requirements, marketers had to face the cancellation of all in-person events. In their place, virtual events have become integral for engagement with customers and cultivating new leads. Increased spending on social media and other digital platforms helps make the events successful.
Now consumers and marketers alike will face warring impulses. While the urge to gather together in person is strong, many consumers are happy to keep things virtual after having experienced the immediacy of live events from the comfort of their own homes.
In order to cater to both audiences, hybrid events are a must. In-person events will have a strong digital component, and technologies like AR and VR have the capabilities to create an immersive experience for those who prefer not to venture out.
Content Alignment
Any company or business that wants to own the industry they are in will need to align its PR, thought leadership, and SEO. The importance of overlapping visibility, credibility, and authority is key and will allow you to easily stand out in your industry. This means that you need to have some source content on your website, as well as other things like social media or sister sites.
First, create a solid base of authority on different topics. Then, work to gain added credibility by adding the PR element, where others quote or mention your topic. Finally, it’s important to make sure that people are linking to your content under certain topics you can own.
More Ownership
There’s a shift that’s happening where more sales and marketing companies are taking ownership of the products or services they help sell. This shift makes sense because having the ability to sell somebody’s product and bring in significant revenue will ultimately increase the value of that company.
If you as a business or company have an ownership stake, you’ll be even more motivated to sell more products. If you are in marketing and sales, start looking at what products and services will benefit from your services. Then, identify which of those companies will allow you to put performance metrics in place to gain some ownership as you meet those goals.
Engaging Nonprofits
There’s a big trend that’s happening where consumers are more frequently looking to support companies that have a mission or give back in some way. This is a trend that will only increase as time goes on. A well-rounded marketing plan should take part in this development by partnering with nonprofits. This partnership not only has the potential to grow your business but will also align you with philanthropic missions that are important to you.
Expanding your brand and reach while engaging in advocacy for a non-profit is a win-win. However, your marketing plan shouldn’t end at simply expressing support for a charitable organization. It should include effective goals such as product placement, affiliate marketing, percentage of sales donations, or corporate sponsorships. These types of partnerships can help your business reach a new audience around the globe.
A.I. and Influencer Marketing
Nearly the majority of marketers report that they budget more than 20 percent of their spending on influencer content. While the death of influencer marketing is often predicted, it has yet to occur. The recent shift towards micro-influencers and more highly engaged audiences shows the change in influencer marketing already. The next shift will be the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. With artificial intelligence, you can leverage the technology for everything from influencer identification to performance influencer marketing.
Alternatives to Third-Party Cookies
Google recently announced that the elimination of third-party cookies has been postponed until 2023. The delay means that the need for marketers to wean themselves from 3P-cookies-based targeting strategies has become slightly less urgent, but it is no less critical. Consumers are demanding greater privacy protections and control over their data, and with that, comes the need to adjust.
You can begin by increasing your efforts to gather and fully exploit first-party data or use tools like Google’s Privacy Sandbox or FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) to achieve personalization and consumer targeting without intruding on the user’s privacy. Regardless, CRM tools, surveys, and interactive content will become increasingly instrumental to marketing success.
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