Brief: Once again, as we do every year, we welcome you to our annual event where we present the marketing trends, insights, digital goals and strategies including the latest ideas and tools for the online and digital marketing industry. This is our 27th annual report and we hope we can continue in our tradition of offering you great forecast of what is about to come.
Changes in business environment, such as higher interest rates, higher cost of borrowing, lower availability of funds in the equity market, diverging economies, and national conflicts once againg together bring on market changes that force companies and their business model strategizing to pivot and reinvent their new operations, marketing methodologies, and product strategies - all to find new business advantages and differentiations to improve their ROI, growth, and marketshare expansion.
In a recent survey conducted by Anaxstar.com with 753 CEOs and CMO’s, the respondents said they are continuing to shift their marketing implementation and execution towards digital marketing and online campaigns and promotions.
As predicted in the last year's report, AI (artificial intelligence) in marketing is playing a great role in changing digital marketing envionment with Microsoft and Google, and others, playing a crucial part. Also, Google Advertising platform as Microsoft Bing Advertising platform, both are seeing either a decline in the number of users, and a remarkable dissatisfaction from their advertisers because of cost increases in marketing expense and lower quality of leads and sales being generated.
Smaller businesses (less than 100 employees) are leveraging blog marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing through viable and profitable digital media channels to replace expensive online advertising on Google and Bing platforms as they no longer seem to deliver a profitable ROI.
As always, you can review Anaxstar.com’s previous years' reports: 2022 Digital Marketing Trends, 2021 Digital Marketing Trends, 2020 Digital Marketing Trends, 2018 Digital Marketing Trends and 2019 Digital Marketing Trends studies, released prior to the pandemic.
As it has been our long tradition now, each year, we contact about a thousand online marketing experts and industry leaders, and top 100 Marketing Agencies, as well as the top PR company executives to conduct a 30-min phone interview to find out how they interpret the marketing trends and ask questions about their predictions for the upcoming year, and what changes or transformations they witness during the previous year. We then compile the data and have an in-house discussion among our own leading marketing experts, each of whom have at least 20+ years of digital online marketing experience. Once all the data is compiled, we produce our report: this Annual Online/Digital Business Marketing Trends and Predictions.
AND THANK YOU IN ADVANCE, FOR YOUR TIME.
And we also like to thank all the people who were involved and provided their expertise and knowledge for us to put this report together, and express our deep appreciation for their support.
FINALLY, see if you notice how we tried to make key points
and avoided long and boring sentences, or pages and pages of reading.
Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for visiting us.
Content marketing is king of marketing, both from point of view of effectiveness and ROI.
Today, most successful business owners and managers know and understand why 'content' is the key to online marketing success, and hence business success. We can no longer argue that businesses are missing out on achieving all the promises of content marketing. However, content development is still a huge effort and therefore costly. With the nearly 50% increase in cost of Google Advertising platform in 2022, and, reduction in the quality of the leads obtained through it, marketing departments can no longer avoid to have a serious content marketing development and campaigning strategy for their business to thrive, or even survive.
87% of respondents said they use content marketing to get website traffic
84% of respondents said they use content marketing to collect emails from visitors (landing page)
81% of respondents said they use content marketing to get website product promotion or engagement
73% of respondents said they use content marketing to get search engine (SEO) ranking to produce organic search traffic which they also claim are the best quality leads compared to all others
69% of respondents said they use content marketing to reduce cost to acquire a lead/subscriber or customer
67% of respondents said content development of blog posts/articles/social posts for the purpose of SEO is still the cheapest form of marketing and an incredibly cost-effective way to grow your brand while it is 6 times more cost-effective to find customers than PPC ads through platforms like Google and Microsoft Bing
TIP: Content marketing is not about "amount of content" produced, is about the quality and effectiveness of content, or often referred to as "compelling content". Think of it this way: great content is not about YOU, or your brand, or your vision, or your objectives. It's about delivering the right information, sought-after and valuable, to your prospects at exactly the right time in the customer journey.
Increased efficiency and effectiveness of AI marketing tools can help analyze huge amounts of marketing metrics and campaigning data to identify patterns and insights that can help strategize and implement calculated marketing strategies and executable plans.
AI marketing tools can deliver on improved targeting and personalization to help identify and target the right audience with an effective message that is based on personalized experiences of consumers to improve engagement, build brand loyalty, and achieve an effective call-to-action.
AI Marketing Tools are being used for:
Well, you use AI Tools. Omnichannel marketing takes a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics. But it could hardly deliver as data analysis was often too time consuming and too much of a burden. Customer journey is all about sending the right message, at the right time. Right message at the wrong time will not work, neither will wrong message at the right time. But how can you do that if it takes so much time to analyze the data?
AI Marketing Tools is the answer.
Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of branding, messaging, content marketing, social media engagement, and online touchpoints as consumers move down the sales funnel process, enabling a more impactful customer experience. When performing an omnichannel content marketing campaign, let's say through article blogging or the social media networks, you need to respond to your audience promptly when they reach out to you, otherwise you will lose their interest and their loyalty. If you have performed a marketing campaign and they have signed up as a new subscriber, then establish your authority and explain to them the value you provide with your products and get them excited about you and your brand.
Walgreens saw a 379% increase in store traffic using IBM AI Marketing Tools with native ads in blogs and website content. The AI tools helped Walgreens to identify the right consumers and reaching them in the right moment and hence experienced a huge increase to its store traffic, and sales.
People of sick of cold email marketing and generally much more cautious about opening an email that potentially would have embedded virus, trojan, or some other online security risk or phishing attacks.
Most people receive so many emails per day that they just don't have time to read unsolicited emails anymore and they just don't trust them either.
Consumers are tired of being bombarded with unwanted, unsolicited emails that are irrelevant and potentially a threat to their computer, while businesses can now focus on improving the quality of their email list to help their marketing department target their customers with better quality of engagement and information for a higher conversion rate.
Video/Blog marketing are the center of all successful digital content marketing campaigns. Even though content marketing methods such as blog posts and articles are very cost effective and generate leads, they almost always perform better when accompanied with videos that convert.
By end of 2022, 84% of marketers used video and blog content marketing because they found it to be cost effective and produce results, especially helping SEO organic search results. In 2023, it is expected that this trend will continue to grow. According to Social Media Week, majority of consumers want to see more video content as long as they are short and concise. Blog articles in the form of guides and informational lists, are hugely popular because people can quickly study it to see if the content is relevant before they invest time in reading it - something they cannot do with watching of videos.
PPC (pay-per-click) is fast losing favor with business owners and marketing professionals.
PPC advertising use to be a very effective way to drive traffic to a website or a landing page and get attention and audience for your products and campaign. But then with Facebook falling flat on it face as a result of December 2021 privacy issues, losing almost half of its advertisers in a matter of months, and Microsoft Bing not able to take advantage due to poor customer support, resulted in Google Ad platform increasing their Ad cost so dramatically that overnight it was not longer a viable marketing method with a decent ROI.
Google's arrogance and increase pricing also went hand-in-hand with business owners experiencing irrelevant clicks which resulted in wasted advertising budget.
Marketers must be ready and willing to acknowledge that customer privacy plays an outsized role and adapt accordingly.
Cookie tracking, marketing data collection absent of privacy adherence is just not going to be accepted. Facebook and Apple are proof that users will no longer accept these breaches.
Marketers need to consider enhanced customer intelligence where the focus shifts from just looking at your top customers’ historical purchasing and decision-making behavior to considering much deeper mindset and targeting important life moments and be willing to operate in a consumer-centric, privacy-friendly ecosystem.
While change can be intimidating; unlike the dinosaurs, digital marketers should be confident and embrace this next evolution targeting capabilities based on page content and consumer mindset and measurement solutions built on measuring real people, and their choices, across platforms.
39% of marketers say proving the ROI of their digital marketing and online campaigning activities is their top marketing challenge.
A formalized lead management system is essential for helping you track ROI because it will identify where and why lead drop off occurs in your campaigning. No matter how good you are at attracting and converting visitors into leads, sales cycles are complex with many factors impacting your conversion rate. You need to track and analyze your lead generation to ensure all efforts, activities and technologies are coordinated in the most efficient way otherwise you will experience sales and marketing misalignment, sluggish lead follow-up and ultimately you will end up wasting campaigning budgets.
Blog post/article (or guest-post in popular blogs) is the most significant lead generation strategy of 2022. It helps with revenue growth in a cost-effective ROI since it facilitates the entire customer lifecycle, (awareness, research, consideration, selection, loyalty, and advocacy) in a single strategy.
Blog post/article or guest-post article are the most current, cost-effective, and fast becoming the most popular marketing trend right about now. Providing your audience with a steady flow of compelling and engaging content has become a linchpin of a successful marketing campaign that produces quick results, and produces 3 times more leads at a 62% lower cost.
Why is this fastest growing marketing trend so successful?
Useful, relevant, articles allow your content marketing strategy display your desire to help customers and provide the information to help them with understanding the problem at hand, and to connect with your audience in a way they favor and builds trust and loyalty.
As customers and buyers continue to do research online to find answers to their questions and concerns, smarter companies are positioning themselves to answer these questions as part of their marketing process, combining prospecting with the customer cycle, lead generation, and order processing (sales).
Successful companies are quickly adopting a full integration between the front-line sales teams to identify topics for content marketing, and the content marketing team to develop content online to help sales professionals to effectively use this content in the sales process by answering customer questions and concerns and develop loyalty and reputation. Most of this takes place over the blog articles or posts which are promoted in Social Media, where customers are relaxed and are enjoying interactions with their friends. Obviously, a no-brainer.
1. Blog post/articles with native ads will be the shocker newest trend of 2022. This method of content marketing is relatively much lower in cost, (than Google Ads), and offers much better ROI, and with as much as 3 times more leads, and 62% lower cost
2. AI-powered business and marketing optimization will be adopted by larger companies
3. Video marketing, streaming, usage, searching, and viewership will continue to soar (even more) in 2022
4. Chat marketing growth will be one of the biggest marketing trends of 2022
5. Marketing personalization will continue to grow and increase profitability
6. Social messaging Apps will be used for business, more and more in 2022
7. Visual searching, e.g. Pinterest, will continue to grow as images in search leverage visual search in more relevant ways
8. Live stream shopping will be introduced to the American public and will become as big as shopping channel in 1980s
9. Voice search, will be finally adopted by more and more people
10. Instagram checkout will continue to grow exponentially, in adoption and use
11. TikTok checkout will continue to grow exponentially, in adoption and use
12. Interactive content marketing will be introduced to the public and will be used more and more, in 2022, including augmented reality ads
13. Omnichannel Marketing will continue to grow, the strategy as ripe, effective, and relevant as ever
14. Messaging on digital platform must be even more compelling than the early years of COVID pandemic
15. By end of 2022, mobile advertising to grow to 85% of all U.S. digital ad spending
16. By end of 2022, American adults are expected to spend about and average 2 hours/day on mobile media
17. Smartphone users spend about 80% of their time on social media
18. Digital advertising will grow to $444.12 billion.
19. Top B2B content marketing strategy will be the most popular blog advertising or guest blog post, growing to 84%
20. 64% of marketers say "blogging for lead generation" will be their number one priority in 2022
21. 71% of marketers will be actively investing in content marketing strategies and producing informational guides or blog articles
22. 5G technology will be introduced and adopted at a faster pace in 2022
23. Green marketing also called eco-marketing or environmental marketing will grow and companies will try to be perceived as a eco-friendly company that offer sustainable strategy embeded in their product strategy
24. Website security will become more important than ever as threats to online users are increasing quite dramatically
25. People like Podcasts and they will continue to grow in participation by audiences of all ages
26. Social media is the fastest growing trend in the history of the world