Marketing is an odd field. It’s something that professionals learn inside-out one year, only to find that the whole game has changed by the next year. There are constantly changing fields of reference, algorithms to cater towards, and trends that tend to net the most money and clicks. As such, marketing in 2022 is set to be markedly different from marketing in previous years. Those firms that are prepared to seize the initiative and adjust their marketing approaches will outcompete their rivals, making this list of on-trend marketing tips particularly appealing for ambitious companies.
Get Your House in Order
The first tip is a seemingly simple one, but it’s something that all marketing teams currently struggle with. How many times per week do you find yourself chasing your colleagues for documents, images, and other digital assets that you simply cannot find on all of your cloud-based storage systems? And how much time, across the entirety of your company, do you imagine is wasted in this task? The answers will vary, but clearly, marketing teams cannot afford to waste dozens of hours a week simply trying to find a document.
Most firms tend to store their documents on Google Drive – a large repository for all their business documents. This system simply doesn’t work in many cases, and a digital asset management platform (DAM) can do the job far better. Compare Drive vs DAM capabilities by reading the linked article. It’ll help you understand how your marketing team can save bundles of time by simply getting your house in order and placing all vital documents at the fingertips of all your staff.
Update Your Skills
Each year, a new form of marketing emerges that promises to be the next big thing. Your team needs to be on top of these emerging trends in case one of them does truly trump the rest. As such, training your teams in new forms of marketing, often with the help of external training companies and consultants, should be something built into the fabric of your employee progressions program. Not only will this help you update your team’s skills, but it’ll help your team feel valued and invested in.
The skills that appear to be the most important to master this year include new forms of social media technology such as TikTok, which few firms have properly engaged with in recent months. Meanwhile, with Google, Facebook and Instagram constantly tweaking their visibility algorithms, it may certainly be worth retraining the relevant workers in how to make the most of algorithmic changes in the coming months. These changes are always opportunities for firms looking to boost their marketing effectiveness.
Consider Outsourcing
For smaller firms, outsourcing has never been more attractive when it comes to certain forms of marketing. Sure, you’ll probably be able to manage your direct marketing, your email marketing, and your social media marketing in-house, but what about the following, more technical forms of marketing:
- SEO marketing involves pushing out keywords as well as making technical changes to your website
- Targeted advertisements across the internet, which often involves some market research that agencies can provide
- Marketing on new forms of media such as TikTok, which you may be yet to get to grips with as a firm
- Affiliate marketing, which involves building partnerships that agencies will find far easier than you due to their large contact list
Outsourcing can feel like an expensive shortcut – something that you should really attempt to handle in-house. Yet most agencies and professional services firms can give you an outline of the cash they expect you to be able to make from their services, which will give you confidence when it comes to selecting partners down the line.
Hone Your Message
Your brand is fluid. Over the years, as you find more and more target markets and your ideal customer shapeshifts, so too should your brand’s messaging. Honing this message over time means effectively A/B testing, using trial and error to see what works best for your brand and your marketing team. You can use KPIs to see which messages have the most profound impact before using those messages to further hone what you’re about and how you communicate with customers and consumers.
This process is a long one, but it’s vital that you’re performing some form of optimization in your messaging and the content that you’re putting out as a marketing team. Each new campaign should be beginning with the teachings of the previous one so that your team is well aware of what’s worked in the past and what has tended to fall a little flat. Use this message honing to really cut through to the consumers you’re most interested in targeting.
Novel Forms and Older Forms
There are emerging forms of marketing to keep abreast of, as mentioned above. TikTok marketing is one of them that’s expected to shoot up in terms of investment this year. Other, more technical forms of marketing will also emerge and balloon in popularity. But in the cut and thrust of innovation, marketing tends to lose sight of old, reliable, and increasingly abandoned forms of marketing that can actually make a profound difference to your brand if you take the time to consider them.
Let’s take television and radio advertising as an example. It’s become far cheaper, as major advertisers have fled online in the belief that there are more ears and eyes to possess on the internet than there are on legacy media. But millions of people still watch TV and listen to the radio regularly, which means that it’s cheaper to access this pool of eyes and ears than it was some years back. Consider engaging in these older forms of marketing in order to differentiate from your more digital competitors.
When it comes to marketing well in 2022, there are several tips. Those outlined here are the main ones which seek to help you to push the boat out and innovate while investing in skills, talent, and optimizing strategies throughout the coming year.
