Marketing Trends: What marketers should do in 2022

Last year we published our article on what we thought to be the biggest marketing trends for 2021. Were we right? You can find out here!!

This year, as all the craziness going on in the world continues unabated, we thought we’d leave the predictions to the mystics and give you something a bit more useful. So here we have advice from some of the best names in marketing about what to concentrate on as a marketer in 2022.

We’ve got some fantastic people who are giving us their thoughts – many of them old friends of Plezi, including Rand Fishkin, Lucy Heskins, Lukasz Zelezny, Waseem Bashir, Benoit Collet and Kathryn Strachan. With so many things grabbing marketers attention as we start the new year, as well as the ongoing emphasis on Digital First, find out what our experts have to say:

Look after your talent

Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of Sparktoro:

“The biggest macro trend I’m seeing in the business and entrepreneurship world, especially in wealthy countries and knowledge-worker-powered organizations is a labor imbalance. Highly capable and experienced individuals have more opportunities open to them than ever before. It’s never been easier to leave a job you don’t love and get paid 30-100% more at your next one. For that reason, my best advice to marketing leaders, agency owners, and those who run teams of any size is to pay your people better, upgrade their benefits, and reduce your demands on their time by optimizing the output (rather than the hours inputted) you do.

If you don’t, someone else will. The good folks will leave your company/team, and you’ll spend far more time and lose far more revenue training up your next set of short-term team members than you would have lost by investing in creating a great environment.”

Think about your customer

Kathryn Strachan, MD of CopyHouse:

“This past year has been a learning experience for marketers. Coming out of a pandemic and adapting to what we now deem as a new ‘normal’ has been a challenge in its own way. 

In 2022, marketers must integrate empathy within their content marketing strategy to grasp their audience’s attention and show them that they are valued. 

In the B2B sector, marketers can lose sight of their target audience and market towards the business as opposed to the person behind the screen. This mentality must be adjusted because if we’ve learnt anything over the course of the pandemic, it’s that people’s needs have changed and should come first. So, if you market to everyone you will reach no one. And in a sales cycle that can take up to 9 months, you must focus on relationship building activities to help your brand stay on top of mind. 

For this reason, marketers must take time out to discover who their ideal customer is. They must ask themselves, what are their customers’ pain-points? What’s keeping them up at night? And most importantly, how can you help solve their issues? Once you have this customer avatar in mind, you can then create personalised content for each stage of the sales funnel and help convert leads into buyers.”

AI and hyper-personalisation

Waseem Bashir, Director of Apexure:

“The future of marketing is going to change drastically over the next year. AI is taking over some of the mundane tasks. We envision hyper-personalisation over the next year, and we will see new tools emerge that auto-optimise campaigns across various channels.

At present, when managing Google Ad campaigns or creating landing pages, there is a human limit on split tests you can run. We need to set up various levers for split testing to work as marketers. But now, with AI-powered tools, we will be looking at AI-generated ad copy and landing pages that dynamically optimise based on past and present performance. A flavour of this trend is visible in Google Ads, where  Responsive Search ads replace text-based ads. It’s a matter of time before we will see this rolled out across various advertising channels.”

Own the customer experience 

Lucy Heskins, Early-Stage Marketer at Oh,Blimey

“Don’t be blinded by the pull of shotgun campaigns or grand promises of 10x leads until you’ve got the strategy right. Your customers, your manager, your organisation, and your career will thank you for it.

Let this year be the one where marketing really owns the customer experience. (And doesn’t just pay lip service!)

It’s your responsibility as a marketer to really dig into this, and not focus on just new enquiries. How customers derive value from your product or service changes. That’s why you’ll see some customers happily renew month after month, and others churn. 

It’s worth checking in with them regularly, but also conducting interviews in a way you understand what else is competing against you, what triggers are at play (triggers can be their boss, lost budget), and ultimately, what they are hiring your product to do. 

Every piece of content you create should help your potential customer to learn how your product will make their life better. 

Every nurture workflow you create should be geared towards helping your customer reach that value realisation moment or ‘aha! moment’ that’ll help them to become happy, paying audiences.”

Do less, better!

Benoit Collet, Growth Manager at Plezi:

“In 2022, marketers will stop seeing channels as strategies, but as promotional weapons. Everyone has an inflated budget for campaign ads, and has seen a decreasing ROI on many channels. It’s time to focus on doing less, but better.

You can start to make your site work better for you. Publish content close to your proposition value, gain control of your contacts and segment them with powerful data. Delight on a few channels, not all. Omnichannel is not only overpriced, but difficult to make work when you spread yourself thin. Before going wild on acquisition, now is the best time to focus on improving your conversion rate for each piece of content you create. We’ve seen some B2B small businesses go from 1 to 5% conversion rate each month on Plezi One, with a very simple content strategy.”

 

Content and translation with AI

Lukasz Zelezny, Director of SEO.London

“2022 will be the year of AI. And not just in the context of buzz words but in the context of specific applications. 

Let me start by mentioning DeepL. It is an AI-powered translator whose quality of translated texts is not far from what professional translators can offer. 

Needless to say, the costs drop dramatically. For 20 EUR the system translates 1 million letters via API. The range of languages is also constantly expanding. 

From my side, I can say that several of my clients have experienced the power of this solution. Not only did they overcome the language barrier, but they were also able to sell in markets where the language was an insurmountable barrier for them. 

It should also be mentioned that internet users often search in their native languages and are often not able to speak English.

Another solution is to create content based on AI. Jarivs.ai, as it is referred to here, is a system based on the GTP-3. 

It can create texts in many languages and if it is not something too complicated it can replace a human being. 

It has built-in templates which make working with Jarvis faster and more efficient.”

So there you have it. Let us know what your thoughts are and what you think about the advice above. What are you concentrating on for your marketing this year? Tell us all about it in the comments below.