Although 2021 was an incredibly difficult year for many of us around the world, it was also a time of rapid change.
This was particularly true of the digital marketing world, which stayed true to form and proved itself to be an industry defined by change, innovation, and creative challenges.
The events of 2021 saw digital and content marketers fulfil an ever-important role as businesses around the world fully embraced digital transformation as a way of dealing with a challenging economic climate. As a result, e-commerce sales volumes hit all-time highs in 2021 as people increasingly relied on online shopping platforms for a range of goods. This was despite inflation increasing the cost of goods.
In this context, digital and content marketers became increasingly relied upon as the digital shopping and e-commerce space became increasingly competitive. And with more businesses than ever vying for space online, this inevitably had an impact on the kinds of tactics and strategies marketers and SEO professionals had to adopt.
With 2021 now well and truly behind us, however, a question that needs to be asked as we look forward to 2022, is whether any of these trends will stick around and if so, which ones.
With this question in mind, in this short blog post, we will take a quick look at what look set to be some of the biggest marketing trends in 2022.
Keeping abreast of these changes and trends is particularly important in an industry that is as fast-moving as the content marketing industry is. So if you want to keep on top of the latest trends, tactics, and strategies you will need to maximise your impact online in 2022, keep reading this article!
Content marketing in 2022—what’s the outlook?
If there is one over-arching trend that will define the outlook for the content marketing world, it is that content marketing will continue to be an important way for businesses to increase their engagements with customers.
According to one set of statistics put together by HubSpot, around 47% of buyers will view three to five pieces of content before engaging a sales rep. Similarly, according to another source, around 85% of customers say that online content has a strong influence on their buying decisions.
What this tells us is that online content will continue to have an impact on the buying habits of users shopping online and the need for businesses to invest in this kind of marketing.
It is also significant that a whopping 89% of customers begin their purchasing process with a search engine. And further, that only a tiny percentage of searchers get past the first page of listed search results. This shows you the need to produce high-quality SEO content that will keep you on top of the rankings, otherwise, your visibility will take a sharp dive.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the trends that look set to dominate in 2022.
Video—the preferred content format?
If one trend has dominated the content marketing world over the last number of years, it is the continued rise of video as a marketing tool.
This looks set to continue into 2022, with videos proving popular even before blogging, email marketing, and other non-video forms of social media.
With that said, the most successful content marketing strategies in 2022 will continue to employ video as a marketing tool. Although the savviest strategies will employ a combination of videos as well as traditional written content. This could mean, for example, creating blog posts with accompanying videos or similarly, writing accompanying blogs for any videos that get posted.
The production costs of video content creation are coming down all the time. So you have increasingly few excuses for not including this kind of material in your content marketing strategies!
Blogging—the old reliable is here to stay!
Just because video has come to assert an increasingly dominant presence in the content marketing world, this does not necessarily mean that it has completely replaced the trusty blog.
This is supported by the data, with HubSpot research noting that the majority of consumers continue to read blogs each week and that these blogs actually impact their purchasing decisions.
Furthermore, when it comes to SEO, blogs are simply a much more robust and easy to use tool for increasing the performance of a particular website in the search engine rankings.
Although we would always recommend combing blogs with other forms of content, this classic written form will continue to be a powerful tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal as we move into 2022!
Virtual Reality, Augment Reality, and the Metaverse
One of the most notable—and perhaps even the most surprising—announcements this year was the launch of the newly rebranded Facebook.
At the end of October 2021, Facebook took the tech world by storm by announcing a whole-scale rebranding that was due to get underway immediately. But this rebranding didn’t just involve a name change from ‘Facebook’ to ‘Meta’. This was the launch of a whole new way of engaging with the online world.
Zuckerberg termed this new online world the ‘Metaverse’, which is a virtual world and digital playground where individuals can work, socialise, and play in a fully online space.
Although this idea and the future it imagines came under heavy criticism for some, it does seem to signal a new direction the online world is taking. With this new direction enabled by new technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
Although these technologies have existed for quite some time already, they have never really fully taken off as their creators and developers hoped they would. However, with Facebook—or as I should now say, ‘Meta’—committing new resources to drive forward this new online world, this could be the point of no return for this new technology.
How exactly these developments and new technologies will impact the content marketing world remains to be seen. However, what does look relatively more certain is that going forward into 2022, digital and content marketers will spend an increasing amount of time thinking about the new possibilities AR, VR, and the Metaverse opens up.
Moving forward into 2022
Although these are just a few of the trends that will continue to pose a creative challenge to businesses and content marketers alike going forward into 2022, they nevertheless give us a general sense of the direction the industry looks set to take.
If you want some help meeting some of these challenges and staying on top of your business goals in 2022, feel free to reach out to a member of the PureContent team today. By setting up a one-on-one consultation with a member of the team, you can access a range of personalised services that will help you to maximise your impact online. Contact us today to find out more!
