A lot can change in a year, especially in the digital space. If you’re looking for the new year’s trends for social media marketing, online advertising, web design, email marketing, mobile ads, or content marketing, we’ve got you covered.
Facebook this, Instagram that, mix in some Twitter and TikTok, and those are the platforms that get all the love and attention. It’s important to put your digital marketing efforts toward these platforms, but they aren’t the only players in the game, as we found out in 2020. Pinterest took some of the spotlight for itself and continued to take advantage of it in 2021. It is possible for an existing social media platform to reintroduce itself to the mainstream. In 2022, LinkedIn will do the same thing.
Over the past year, marketers could have reached nearly 800 million people on LinkedIn. With growth on the platform of 3% per quarter, it will continue to grow and be a crucial platform to promote your brand. LinkedIn has even released a “Creator Mode” which encourages users to post original content, specifically video. As these features are popularized, LinkedIn is expected to grow…fast.
It’s been known on social media, we’ve touched on it with email marketing, and now it’s time to talk about it for web design: make things personal! It’s time to ditch all those stock photos and showcase who and what your brand truly is! Creating a website that is more personal to your brand will give customers a better feel for your business and help build initial trust.
The best way to get personal with your web design in 2022 is to look toward illustrations and animations! Not only do illustrations give your website a modern and clean look, they’re an easy way to showcase your brand through images as they’re customizable. Want to take those illustrations to the next level? Animations…more specifically parallax scrolling & animations have taken off as the must-have trend on websites.
Parallax scrolling involves having both the front image and the background move in the same direction but having the front image move at a faster rate. Now throw in animations to the background and foreground with parallax scrolling and you’ll engage your audience with an impressive, brand focus web design!
There are pros and cons when utilizing web design trends like parallax scrolling & animations to websites. In some cases, it may be best to overlook the trends if it impacts web performance results like speed and optimization.
Over the last few years, big tech companies have spent a bit of time in D.C. for their data collection practices. That time spent there was not for nothing. Many companies, like Google, have been forced to change policies to protect users’ privacy and data. This is important for digital marketing.
If Google can’t get their hands in the cookie jar, how can you enjoy the cookies of your customers you’ve typically enjoyed for your targeting? It’s time to take a step back and focus on first-party data collection. Collecting first-party data can happen from mobile apps, websites, social media, email, surveys, and point of purchase to name a few. This, in turn, will make remarketing a huge focal point in terms of pay-per-click advertising and even social media!
It’s been no secret that people can’t get enough of their mobile phones. Why do anything on a desktop that you can do from the comfort of your couch or the “comfort” of the subway seat with your phone! Since customers are on their phones, so should your advertising.
Mobile advertising spend in the US is expected to hit 240 billion dollars by the end of 2022. This means there is a lot of competition out there, so your mobile ads need to be completely optimized. An often overlooked feature of mobile ads is your website. Your ads are most likely sending users to your website and if the user is on a mobile device, your site had better be built for a mobile user! This means it needs to be fast and responsive. A popular design trick for 2022: making sites reflect an app-style user experience to help drive engagement. These are all factors to consider if you’re looking to improve your mobile ad success rate.
Every business is focused on efficiency and effectiveness. If you’re not, it may be time to evaluate some priorities. When it comes to marketing spend or energy used on a marketing strategy, companies want to make sure they’re getting every last ounce out of their efforts. This is why double dipping is important!
Effective web content has grown from the average 1,150 words to over 2,000! That’s nearly double the amount of content! It’s crucial to maximize these efforts by doubling up your blog with more custom content. Utilizing infographics and videos in your web content not only enriches your long content to make it more engaging, but it provides additional opportunities to be discovered online. Google Images and Videos can pull directly from your web content to show people searching on Google. It also allows your company to build its YouTube channel with the video that can link to the blog. Your infographics can be recycled for social media which are highly shareable content.
We’re not even being dramatic. There is a reason YouTube is the 2nd most visited site in the world and the 2nd most used search engine behind Google. There is a reason why there was a huge concern that TikTok might get banned. There is a reason why Instagram, a photo app, has made a giant push toward video to compete against TikTok. As we mentioned above, LinkedIn is even pushing video content. VIDEO IS IMPORTANT and now is the time to optimize for it!
We often talk about optimizing content for Google, but now it’s time to optimize your video content for YouTube…and Google. We recommend uploading videos to YouTube and embedding them into your content. When you upload a video, make sure to include an enticing title that will relate to someone’s search, include tags, and most importantly, put effort into your description. Your video’s description text is like a mini blog providing plenty of resources and info that can help the user and YouTube understand what the video and information is about.
In turn, when you optimize your content on YouTube, those videos can also show up in a Google Search if it relates to the specific search query!
In case you missed it, video content is crucial for 2022. We’ll try not to beat the dead horse here but people want and are engaging with video content. Over the next year, email hosting companies will most likely be rolling out the capabilities to embed videos into emails if they have’t already. Until then, including a graphic with a play button logo over it that is linked to a video should do the trick.
If you want a similar effect before the rollouts come, animation in emails still get high engagement from users as it’s a fun and creative way to capture attention. There are plenty of creative ways to utilize animation such as the backdrop of the email, a main focal point, or a subtle animation that enhances the theme or message you're trying to convey.
2020 saw people taking advantage of the power of social media to promote nonprofits and charities that they were passionate about. Instagram took notice and found a better way to help spread awareness and support of these causes. Through Instagram’s donation button, users can donate directly to the cause from the app.
This is a huge development in terms of success and marketing for nonprofits. Not only does it take a step out of the process for users to donate, users can add a certain donation campaign from a nonprofit directly to their personal profile. This feature shows how much donations have been made toward their goal and provides an easy way for people visiting someone’s profile to join in on the cause. The best part about it- Instagram stated they take nothing away from these donations and 100% of the money donated on Instagram makes it to the nonprofit.
Bring on the content! In case you hadn’t noticed or missed our mention in trend #5 for the year, longer content is what’s in right now. People are looking for long, quality content. We’re not just talking about more content in terms of written content but also, and of course, video content.
In 2021, TikTok increased its video length to 3 minutes. Instagram Reels increased from 30 to 60 seconds. While our attention spans may seem short, the content that has proven to perform better again and again is longer content.
Keep that in mind the next time you’re writing captions too!
In terms of design trends across the digital world from social media and emails to web design and content, 2022 has two hot items: 90’s-00’s aesthetic and motions such as GIFs and videos (eye roll).
People are just feeling nostalgic and the 90s kids are getting more disposable income to play with. Featuring graphics and photos that call back to their younger days will certainly draw emotions and connections to your product or brand.
Motion graphics are also expected to see even more shine over the next year. We’ve said it so many times already so we’ll keep it short- moving things catch our eyes!
So there you have it, the new innovations in marketing to help you master your marketing efforts and bring success to your brand. If this was a bit overwhelming for you, that’s okay. Marketing takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise. That’s why we’re here. Contact team Vibe for your digital marketing needs so you can focus on your business and hopefully save some time for self-care!
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