Top Twelve Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2022
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There is a lot of uncertainty for marketing in 2022 due to the ongoing impact of the pandemic and fluctuating economy, and making marketing decisions without sufficient information could cause irreversible damage to your entire brand.
One of the best ways to act swiftly and still avoid costly mistakes in marketing is by learning marketing trends from experts who've successfully navigated uncertain times.
So we spoke to some of Zoho's marketers, with a collective experience of over 90 years and we've presented their marketing predictions for 2022 here. We hope you'll find them insightful and that they can help your business to make informed decisions.
Aarthi
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Vertical-focused GTM with niche segmentation will gain more currency
By and large, product marketing has been about building the GTM for broad user segments. As markets are maturing, the trend is gradually moving towards niche segmentation. One GTM trend that I see gaining more currency is an increased focus on tapping into business verticals.
When it comes to vertical marketing, brands have realised that software users in different professions have different use cases. Let's take the example of web conferencing platforms for training professionals. Within this industry are various different professionals like teachers, leadership coaches, and music experts. A teacher uses white-boarding and annotation while a guitar instructor prefers to add music to her video stream. As a product marketer, you have to position the platform for both these user segments. And that's what I see as the biggest challenge and opportunity in marketing going forward.
The cascading effects of COVID-19 will continue to influence the way marketing is run in 2022. However, that doesn't mean a doomsday situation for marketing professionals, as there is also strong hope for revival. Be cautious in spending, but do not panic!
Studies say that in 2021 the worldwide marketing budget was reduced by between 15% and 20% compared to previous years. I anticipate that this trend will continue in 2022 as we are still reeling from the cascading effects of uncertainty due to COVID-19. Before the pandemic, companies invested 50% of their budget on outdoor advertising (billboards, airport ads, etc.) and physical events, such as trade shows and conferences, but that number has dropped and there will be a further drop in investment in these modes of advertising and brand building.
However, as the economy has shown signs of recovery in the last two quarters, businesses will start investing more in demand generation and retaining existing customers, instead of overall branding promotions. This means that marketers have to adapt to unexpected changes in consumer behavior, identify new digital marketing channels, and diligently measure ROI from every dollar spent on promotions.
Marketing leaders across every industry will be expected to learn new digital marketing strategies quickly, encourage their teams to transition to post-pandemic marketing tactics, and, most importantly, implement ready-to-use multichannel marketing platforms to accelerate their business growth. Self-service marketing tools like chatbots, email marketing, pre-recorded webinar hosting tools, social media, SMS and instant messaging, and ways to educate existing customers will play a pivotal role as the digital transformation process has accelerated in many traditionally brick-and-mortar industries, like education, healthcare, and retail in the last 18 months
The final consideration is that agility in experimentation and paying attention to customers' privacy will play a crucial role in the growth of businesses in 2022 as customers are also becoming more tech-savvy after the pandemic.
Gopal Sripada
Head of Marketing and Customer Experience, Zoho CRM
Meera Sapra
Product Manager
More human, authentic storytelling. Building in public.
I’m not a big believer in marketing trends. But I do believe that marketing is evolving with time. We learn to craft better stories around the products that we build. We learn to be more human in the ways we engage our audience. This includes the language we speak and the platforms that we use to connect with them.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen some changes in how people consume and share information, with a clear shift towards digital channels. This is something I believe benefits marketers and makes it easier for us to experiment and try new things. I think we can expect to see experimentation become more central to marketing. Marketers will have more freedom to try out new ideas while breaking away from old templates and “previously proven” methods.
Another trend I believe we’ll see more of is building products in public. We’ve already seen some of this over the last couple of years, and I think this goes along with us being more human in the way we tell our stories. Building in public is about sharing the journey while we build our product, including the lessons we learn along the way—not just the successes, but failures too. For product creators, this is the equivalent of baring your product’s soul to the world. When you build a product in public, you’re also building a brand that’s transparent and authentic right at its core. I think this is an exciting and new direction for marketing and I can’t wait to see more brands being built in public.
Connecting marketing to other functions will become one of the highest priorities for businesses.
The role of marketing in the customer experience is not to dress up the value proposition to attract new customers. Studying customer segments, establishing pricing models, building customer communities, and educating customers about products and services are all responsibilities that marketing leads and their teams need to take on today.
When closely connected with sales, marketing can generate better leads and help nurture them towards purchases more effectively. When connected with service or success, marketing improves the quality of education and helps reduce churn. When connected with commerce, marketing enables powerful self-service experiences.
When connected with finance, marketing insights help with planning the use of capital better within the organization. This is already happening at many of the world’s most progressive companies and will become the norm everywhere in the next couple of years.
Prashanth Krishnaswami
Head of Market Strategy & Thought Leadership, Customer Experience
Prason. S
Marketing Strategist at Zoho Cliq
Don’t do marketing you can’t measure.
This is not a prediction so much as a reminder of a basic element that's often overlooked based on my experiences working at different firms and my interactions with marketing leaders across the globe: measuring your marketing.
I have worked in eight different marketing teams in the last 16 years, and only two of these teams analyzed all their tactical, operational, and strategical moves.
I also gathered the following alarming information from a sample group of 50 marketing teams over the last year:
- Only 4 teams measured every activity
- 42 teams did not have any measurement processes in place
- 40 teams did not have monthly, quarterly, or annual goals
The reality is that even though marketing is seen as important, many marketing teams do not have a strategic marketing thinker at the top to drive the team and give them direction.
To put it bluntly: Every single activity in marketing can be measured, and any activity you can't measure wastes your time and your organization’s money.
2022 is not going to be dominated by just one trend. Every marketer, whether they focus on social media marketing (which is going from strength to strength), video marketing, content marketing, account-based marketing, podcasts, influencer marketing, or explore other avenues to reach their target audience, needs to know their goals and the metrics that they need to focus on to achieve them. For example, social media marketers should know the top metrics for each channel they use. If their LinkedIn metrics include follower count, impressions, engagement rate, page visits, and new leads, then all their activities must be focused on improving these metrics.
So my prediction for 2022 (and every year) is if you can’t measure what you do, your marketing efforts will be useless. And if you specialize in just one vertical, it is high time to start exploring other avenues. T-shaped marketers will play a huge role in taking your marketing to the next level.
2022 will be a lot about personalization, without the creepiness
The future of customer experience is finding ways to make it personal, without being creepy. There has been a lot of talk about the customer experience lately, but the brands that truly embrace it will continue to drive growth in the next decade. Whether it's more immersive point-of-sale experiences, long term loyalty benefits, or more focus on self-service solutions, technology will play a huge role in taking the customer experience forward. Strong CX also requires solid EX and businesses should embrace offering superior employee and agent experiences for that reason, especially in the distributed, multi-cultural, cross-functional, work environments that we're now getting used to.
In this internet-centric information economy, where hot takes are everywhere, quality still triumphs over quantity when it comes to community building. There's way too much content for people to consume and brands can't just keep serving content through a hosepipe if they really want to build trust and authority. There's a reason people pay to read Ben at Stratechery or will subscribe to Shreyas Doshi's SuperFollow feed on Twitter. A pandemic-led, celebrity-induced, VC-backed, exclusive social network can get very popular very quickly but it will suddenly become irrelevant for many of us within a few months. The rise (and fall?) of Clubhouse shows us that many trends are short-lived and people eventually figure out where they want to spend their time and how.
Consumption of videos peaked in 2021 and brands will continue to invest in creating more videos, both in-house and with the help of independent creators (expect to see more reels!) and agencies. Video consumption statistics are through the roof, and more than 75% of all video views come from mobile devices.
As third-party cookies are on the way out and customers are increasingly privacy-conscious, marketers will have to work on building trust by creating value for the customer. Useful content, delivered in a range of formats (long-form, tweets, reels, the list goes on...) for easy consumption is one way of doing that—and we'll see that happen more often.
Praval Singh
Vice President - Marketing & Customer Experience
Ram Vaidyanathan
Product Marketing Manager
Collaborate with specialized influencers who can create high quality video content
Personalize your content based on your target audience micro segment:
There are two B2B marketing trends that I want to highlight. These two trends will also be relevant for B2C companies.
Influencer marketing with videos:
Companies will benefit from collaborating with highly specialized influencers, who can create high quality video content. These specialized influencers may not have many followers, but they may still be highly regarded within their industry and have high engagement rates. Audiences are also moving away from consuming text to consuming audio and video.
Personalization through micro segmentation:
The target audience should be segmented into groups of micro segments. In B2B, common examples of macro segments are organization size, location, and industry. With micro segmentation, you should be delving deeper and segmenting based on challenges faced, desired outcomes, aspirations, maturity levels with regards to the product or service you offer, and other more specific metrics. Content should then be personalized for each of these micro segments. The format the content is delivered in is less important than it being personalized based on the micro segment the target audience belongs to.
Resilient marketing, sustainable growth.
Talking about resiliency and sustainability might sound weird in a world where companies can grow astronomically and set new valuation benchmarks without making any real profit, just by relying on borrowed money.
The last two years have been turbulent, and difficult times have taught us the importance of being resilient. Marketers need to think long term and craft marketing strategies that stand the test of time and generate growth that is sustainable for years, or even decades. It is not enough if you grow fast, you also need to grow strong.
Vibhav
Head of Product Marketing, Zoho CRM
Parting thoughts
Fantastic! You're now up to date with the first part of our predictions for the biggest marketing trends for 2022. Thanks for taking the time to read what our marketers have to say. We hope you learned something new today that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.
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