Scott Maloley – President at Digital Clicks Marketing
Top B2C Marketing Trends 2022
HubSpot surveyed over 1000 global marketing professionals working in B2B and B2C companies to determine upcoming trends for 2022!
INFLUENCER MARKETING
In 2021, influence marketing returned the highest ROI. In 2022, 61% of B2C marketers surveyed plan to leverage influencer marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing?
This form of marketing involves getting endorsements from people or organizations who have a large following and expert knowledge in their field. With influencer marketing, you can reach a larger audience quickly and easily, and see amazing results!
How Do Influencers Help Your Marketing?
Reach a new and often bigger audience
You can use the power of influencers to reach a much wider audience. Influencer marketing is all about targeting people who share similar interests and behaviors, so it’s no wonder that this works best when combined with your target market persona!
Build trust for your product or service
It’s not enough to just say what your company does. People are going find out on their own anyway so it has be backed up by customers and experts!
Grow your social media following
Users you reach through influencer marketing strategy will also frequently follow your brand on social media.
Increase traffic to your website
Consumers will want to learn more about what their favorite influencer is purchasing or using, this will lead them to your!
Lead generation & Increase Sales
Recommendations are powerful and an influencer’s followers want what they have.
Help your SEO
Backlinks are valuable for your SEO ranking and depending on the content, this could give you quite a few!
SHORT-FORM VIDEO CONTENT
Short-form video content returned the 2nd highest ROI in 2021 and it is the format marketers plan to invest the most in during 2022!
What is Short-Form Video?
Short-form videos are the newest, most exciting type of content. They’re not too heavy on viewers and can be up to 2 minutes long! Videos like these would work well for social media platforms because they only take a second or two at most before you move onto something else in your feed (like an update about what clothes were trending).
Why use Short-Form Video Content?
Video content is still the top format for advertising as consumers retain more information through video than traditional banner ads. In addition, consumer attention spans have become shorter and it’s important to leverage short-form videos that captivate your audience quickly in order attract customers efficiently!
INBOUND MARKETING
Inbound marketing strategies are here to stay. 80% of marketers plan to keep their budget or increase it in 2022.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is an innovative way to attract customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored specifically for them. Rather than interrupting your audience with unwanted messages, in-buying forms connections they are looking for that solve problems you already have on the go!
Examples of Inbound Marketing
- Blog Articles
- Social Media Content
- Videos
- Email Campaigns
- chatbots
- Ads
- Marketing Automations
What are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing?
Cost Effective
Inbound marketing is able to produce leads for an organization organically.
Useful long-term
Inbound marketing is developing a connection with your target audience, therefore will have a long-term effect on your overall performance.
Increase Brand Awareness & Authority
Inbound marketing is the ideal strategy for brand awareness. It can get message out and spread the word about you brand identity. It can also generate leads and sales in the long-term.
Offer Solutions for your Consumers
Inbound marketing is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to creating content that people are looking for and answering their questions. This increases trust in the brand, making them more likely buy what you’re selling!
Increase Brand Reach
Inbound marketing allows you to expand your reach and connect with customers in ways that were never possible before, through a more targeted audience who requires what your business offers instead of anyone else! It’s more relevant, targeted and exciting!
AUDIO CONTENT
Audio is slowly creeping up into the content mix! Approximately 43% of B2C marketers plan to increase their investment in podcasts in 2022.
What is Audio Content?
Audio content in digital marketing includes any type of published information or asset that is consumed through listening.
Examples of Audio Content
- Podcasts
- Audiobooks
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as voice assistance.
Tips for Using Audio Content
Audio Books and podcasts have become increasingly popular over the past few years. Audio content offers you another avenue to reach your target audience. Through your Audio content it is smart to include clear and relevant call-to-actions.
Tip 1: Include short into ads
Tip 2: Mention your landing page/website and what your website is about
Tip 3: Promote upcoming events or promotions
Tip 4: Promote recent blog posts
Tip 5: Subtly mention your products or service throughout your audio content
BRAND TRANSPARENCY
Over the past few years, consumers are starting to hold brands more accountable. Creating trust through full transparency will be one of the leading trends in 2022.
What is Brand Transparency?
Brand transparency indicates how a brand shows itself to be open and accessible to internal or external stakeholders. When a brand is transparent, it reveals data about their goals, values, prices, operations, finances, and data that could be considered sensitive, like impact on the environment. This allows brands to establish trust between themselves and their customers.
3 Elements of a Transparent Brand
According to the Consumer Good Forum the 3 elements of a transparent brand include:
1. Corporate Practice
A brand communicates its policies and performance clearly to consumers.
2. Product Proof
A brand communicates proof to customers about the effectiveness of their products or services. This also includes answering the question about what impact of the product or service has.
3. Brand Purpose
When a brand communicates its values and beliefs to their customers. This allows customers to understand if a company’s values match their own.
How Brand Transparency Benefits your Business
Increase Brand trust
89% of people say a brand can regain their trust if they admit to a mistake and are 100% transparent about steps it will take to resolve the issue.
Increase Brand Loyalty
Transparency makes trust possible and is essential for any long-term relationships amongst your customers. A study by Label Insight revealed that 94% of consumers would be loyal to a brand that offers complete transparency.
Increase Brand Equity
Having a strong customer trust and loyalty gives you an advantage over your consumers. In some instances this means that you can charge a higher price or easily launch new products.
The landscape of marketing has changed over the last few years, and there are some new trends that will be emerging in 2022. All these trends come to B2C space but they’re not just for startups because established brands can use them too!
If you have any interest or would like help implementing it into your own strategy get ahold us we’ll chat about how DCM could work together with your brand on creating successful digital plans which drive more traffic & conversions through innovative creativity for your business!
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