Whether or not we like to admit it, the world is in turmoil. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, our habits have gone for a toss. Every experience we took for granted has changed, and this means brands and consumers have had to adapt too. 

When consumer behavior changes, it is inevitable that the marketing world undergoes a drastic change as well. The world is increasingly going digital owing to the lockdown and public gathering limitations over 2020 and 2021. And this has posed new challenges and opportunities for digital marketing. 

But these challenges have shaped the industry as it is now. 

The 2022 Digital marketing trends are a culmination of the learnings from 2020 to 2021. And they include a mix of expectations from the coming year too.

In this blog, Kimp brings you a compilation of the top 2022 Digital marketing trends and tips for your brand to leverage them in the best possible manner. 

So with no further ado, let’s jump right in.

Top 2022 Digital Marketing Trends + Tips for your Brand 

Digital marketing is developing every day as we speak. Marketing budgets increase every quarter to accommodate the growing trends and changes in this industry. In fact, in 2021 43% of marketers increased their marketing budgets, and 66% expect a rise in 2022 too.

Even with increased budgets, digital marketing is a tough nut to crack. The results you see involve more factors than just your spending power. Getting constant attention and engagement has become a challenge in the digital marketing space. Reducing attention spans. Increased content volume across channels. And the ever-changing algorithm from tech companies are just a few challenges in this sphere. 

But if you have a handle on the latest trends in digital marketing, you can plan your campaigns well and not be at the mercy of budgets or algorithms. 

So what are the 2022 digital marketing trends? And how can you apply it to your brand in 2022? 

1) The dominance of Visual Content 

The first of the top 2022 digital marketing trends helps you stand out on crowded digital marketing channels. 

And that is creating a dominance of visual content in your strategies. Yes, images, videos, GIFs, memes, animations, and more have to become your brand’s communication across marketing channels. 

Visual content has the power to cement your brand’s identity in consumers’ minds for a longer period compared to text. This is in part because of color psychology in marketing. It is also easier to communicate complex ideas via visuals than the written word. 

So, how are we so confident that visual content dominance is a major digital marketing trend in 2022?

Well, two major reasons: 

• Visual search is now bigger than ever. Pinterest, Google Lens, and many ecommerce platforms now allow customers to search by uploading an image. To make the cut in these searches you’ve got to populate your content bank with high-quality and brand-relevant visuals. 
• Even in traditional SERPs, SEO traffic has started to come from images and videos. Yes, image SEO and video SEO have been trending for a while now. And 49% of marketers agree that optimizing video and images for SEO gets better results. 

Looking to understand how to do this? For starters, repurpose your blogs into video content and infographics with the same keywords and tags. This way search engines can reach them easily. These are easier to digest than text and help in SEO.

Kimp Tip: Repurposing content must be a huge priority for you. It allows you to make the most of your long-form textual content by turning it into visual content. But you must also remember to retain quality for the best user experience. 

Consider a Kimp Graphics (graphic design services) or Kimp Video (motion graphics services) unlimited design subscription to get started on this for your brand. 

2) Personalization always wins

While every consumer values privacy, they favor personalization too. Personalized campaigns see a higher rate of engagement, conversions, and glowing reviews from consumers. The key is to allow customers to opt-in for data tracking and analysis so they don’t suffer a huge shock. 

This 2022 digital marketing trend holds the potential to make your brand’s marketing campaigns go viral. Consider Spotify Wrapped. Every customer gets unique, tailored, personalized content, and people love it. Most even look forward to it. 

When you adopt personalization, you have to embrace it at every vertical. We’re talking about content, service, and product creation, to name a few. In fact, an EmailMonks survey tells us that personalized emails have a 3x better performance rate when compared to other blast emails. 

Personalized campaigns often rely on data analysis software, insight tools, and customer data. But you must not forget the role of design in these. 

Even in personalized campaigns, customers expect branding consistency in design and your answer to this are pre-designed templates. Having branded templates at hand helps you save time, ensure branding consistency, and save costs on redesigns. 

Looking to create customized, branded templates for various customer profiles? Kimp’s unlimited design service is what you need. Book a call today with the team to know more! 

3) Adopt Social Commerce 

In every 2022 digital marketing trend report, social commerce is a standard fixture. In the same way ecommerce changed the face of retail a few years ago, social commerce is the next big thing in social media trends and the retail industry too.

This 2022 digital marketing trend honestly holds the potential to explode ecommerce. And make it accessible to millions of new consumers too.  

We have 4 billion social media users in the world. And more than 50% favor connecting with their favorite brands on these platforms. Brands now have the opportunity to sell their products to these consumers without building an external infrastructure. 

Consumers too are in favor of brands reaching out to them over a single channel. They want to shop while scrolling through Instagram, watching a video on YouTube, and so on. Social commerce is the next natural and logical step in the omnichannel sales retail customers expect in the APAC region, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and US regions. 

As customers move to social media profiles to shop, the need for aesthetic social media feeds, high-quality product images, and engaging content only grows higher.

Wondering how to amp up your existing material into social commerce-ready creatives? Sign up for the Kimp Graphics (graphic design services) or Kimp Video (motion graphics services) subscriptions now. And work with a design team for a flat monthly fee to get all your creatives designed, resized and revised! 

4) Growth by Video marketing 

We know we covered visual content. But the growth of video content over the past couple of years has been so phenomenal that it deserves a separate section. Our blog on Video marketing statistics clearly tells us that video content is here to stay and makes a lot of money for marketers. 

But what video content should you be focusing on as per the 2022 digital marketing trends? Hubspot’s survey tells us that short-form content is a consumer and marketer favorite with 46% of marketers considering it to be an ideal investment for performance and engagement.

TikTok is all set to become the fastest growing social media network and every social media platform today has a short-form content feature. These videos are also easier to script, produce, edit, and engage by. 

So if you want to reach a wider audience and play your hand at going viral, we suggest you create a TikTok and Instagram Reels profile. Wondering what to create to post on there? Why don’t you check out some Instagram reels ideas?

5) Marketing to Gen Z 

Yes, Gen Z is going to get even more importance in 2022, if you can believe that. And with good reason. The oldest Gen Z is 24 years old now, probably working for a living, and having an enormous influence on all things digital in their immediate family and friends group. 

Ignoring them is a mistake that no brand should make. According to a study by Brandwatch, Gen Z marketing needs entertainment-based content with a lot of focus on typical pop culture elements such as movies, sitcoms, games, and so on. So that is how you gain their attention. 

Marketing campaigns centering on popular shows is no new concept with brands hopping on Money Heist, Squid Game, and so on for some years now. And these have been a huge success thanks to the Gen Z factor. 

Gen Z marketing can also extend to nostalgia-based marketing with Pop Art designs for connecting with them emotionally. 

But the main takeaway here is that every brand must woo Gen Z with content, design, and product development if they want long-term success.

6) Reaching diverse audiences 

Digital marketing erases boundaries, right? You can launch campaigns from the USA that get impressions in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the smallest cities in Europe. While this simplifies things a lot, it also puts the onus on brands and marketers to create diverse strategies for diverse audiences spanning cultures, economic classes, and geographic locations.

The demand for inclusive content from customers has gained a lot of momentum, forcing brands to ensure representation at every touchpoint. And this must not remain a marketing strategy alone. It has to go beyond and reach where people find representations in your brand’s language, design, product development, and user interface as well. 

Experts tout inclusive design to be a major graphic design trend in 2022. So ensure you consider the varied customer profiles in  your target audience before choosing brand colors, typographies, imagery, and so on. 

Kimp Tip: When you are looking to build an inclusive brand design style sometimes custom illustrations can come in handy. They help you project the future you see with your customers. And they are very attractive too. 

Looking for illustrations for your brand? You can get them and tons of other design types from Kimp Graphics unlimited graphic design services)!

7) Intent-based marketing 

Gone are the days when keyword volume was the only holy grail of SEO and content marketing. No, marketers are ditching the herd practices and choosing to become more sensitive to their customers’ needs as per our next 2022 digital marketing trend.

And that is why intent-based marketing must be on top of your to-do list for 2022. Understand what your customer really wants. What drives them to look for your product? And what is their mindset when they consume your content? These questions will give you an insight into the emotional journey of a consumer so that you can position yourself well before them. 

This trend extends from B2C to B2B marketing campaigns too. In B2B, experts call it account-based marketing where sales and marketing teams work together to create content based on the hurdles the sales team encounters during a deal. 

In our blog on creating content for different stages of buyers’ journeys, we outline how each content type suits the awareness, conversion, and consideration stage. Creating content that answers customers’ requirements at each stage can improve your conversion rates. And it will build goodwill for your brand in the market too. 

Kimp Tip: The buyer’s journey is a rollercoaster ride. It is the brand’s responsibility to guide them seamlessly across all touchpoints by creating accessible and easy-to-understand content. 

Need help with your designs? Choose from a variety of formats from the Kimp Graphics (graphic design services) or Kimp Video (motion graphics services) design subscriptions so that your customers have a memorable experience. 

8) Enhanced Distribution across channels

If there is one thing that every marketer has been saying for years it’s to repurpose, reuse, and recycle every piece of content you ever create. There are hundreds of channels available in the digital marketing forum currently. And you cannot choose to publish in just one or two if you want higher engagement and revenue from it. 

So every time you create content for digital marketing in 2022, think of what more it can be. Can you repurpose it into a video, infographic, social media post, newsletters, podcast, and so on? 

When you repurpose, you have to also keep in mind: 

• The most popular content forms. For example, if you think that you have a great blog that isn’t receiving enough attention, repurpose it into a series of short videos. 
• The platforms your consumers inhabit. If you have a younger audience, you must be on Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter. But if you have an audience of the Baby Boomer generation, then newsletters and Facebook videos are the places to be. 

Hubspot recommends leveraging at least three to five distribution channels so that you can reach different audiences and improve brand visibility across generations and cultures. 

Kimp Tip: When you repurpose content, ensure that you follow the specifications and design standards of each platform. Work with your design team to create optimized content for each platform. 

8) Balance Ephemeral & Permanent Content 

Instagram Stories, Snapchat streaks, and Twitter fleets were the talk of the town when 2021 began. But after a year of dominating ephemeral (short-lived content), we have seen the demise of LinkedIn stories and Twitter fleets. 

So is it the end of short-lived content? Not quite, given how Instagram Stories still have a vast customer base and get a billion views every day. Instead what marketers gauge to the top trends in 2022 digital marketing is a balanced approach to ephemeral and permanent content.  

Kelly Hendrickson, HubSpot’s social media marketing manager, says, “The combo of a running clock and a live audience is a huge opportunity for brands to lean into quick, in-the-moment content that showcases the more light-hearted elements of their brand. Succinctness and clarity are key in content.”

However, Hendrickson adds, “the social platform often dictates Ephemeral content versus permanent content, as well as by the audience’s behavior on the platform.”

So you can continue to focus on Instagram Stories and Snapchat as per your brand’s goals. But you must also invest in permanent content for a nuanced and profitable marketing campaign. 

Kimp Tip: The good news is that permanent content can easily become ephemeral by reposting them on Stories. And you can also convert Stories that perform well into permanent content. All you need is a team that tracks popular content from your brand. And a design team to repurpose it for other channels. 

Ace your 2022 Digital Marketing with Kimp

This roundup of 2022 digital marketing trends has one major takeaway across all trends. Visual content and design have a huge role to play in 2022’s marketing campaigns. Directly and indirectly, graphic design and video hold the power to beget your brand a lot of success. 

And it is time to invest in quality and creative graphic design services to stand out in the crowded arena that digital marketing is. 

Kimp Graphics (graphic design services) or Kimp Video (motion graphics services) design subscriptions give you unlimited design requests and revisions. You can invite as many collaborators as you’d like to help you make and manage design requests for an unlimited number of brands. All for a flat monthly fee. We cover a ton of design categories – including custom illustrations. So one subscription is all you need to create any campaign you want. 

Sign up for the free trial now and start planning your 2022 digital marketing campaigns.