From Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, social media platforms have been around for years, and they’re here to stay! The future of brand marketing is social. Given this, there’s a difference in how brands are leveraging these platforms to market their brands compared to a few years ago. Also, with social platforms introducing new features, marketers need to have answers to questions such as:
How to engage with audiences this year better?
What trends would dominate the social media marketing landscape in 2022?
In this blog, we will look at the social media marketing trends in 2022 that marketers need to watch out for and how to brace up for the challenges that lay ahead in detail.
Social Media Marketing Trends 2022
Augmented Reality (AR) Will Become Consumer’s Preferred Way to Try On Products and Interact With Brands
With AR being around for quite a few years, brands are embracing it to enable consumers to test products online before making any purchases. Giving consumers an immersive and interactive experience, AR can help increase your clickthrough rates (CTRs) by almost 33 percent leading to an uptick in purchases.
Carolina Arguelles Navas, the Head of AR Product Marketing and Strategy for Snap Inc. claimed that AR will become the consumer’s preferred choice to try products in 2022. Also, the advent of metaverse will take social media, customers’ interactions with brands and marketing technology projects to a whole new dimension.
Reaching New Audiences Will Be the Most Important Social Media Goal for Businesses
One of the main reasons why marketers can’t do without social media is its uncanny potential to reach out to target audiences across various geographies. Since the inception of social platforms, they are being used for bridging the gap between brands and consumers. Be it before, now or in the future, marketers will always leverage these platforms to reach out to audiences, improve customer retention and service and enhance brand-consumer relationships in a big way.
B2B Companies Will Increase Their Investment in Instagram and Twitter
Despite being consumer-focused platforms, Instagram and Twitter are helping B2B marketers realize their true potential over the years. The platforms have been delivering a considerably good ROI on products and other marketing promotions.
While Instagram has a whopping 1.074 billion users, Twitter has recorded 206 million users in 2021. These numbers are evidence of the platforms’ popularity and the level of user engagement provided by them. With businesses looking for new avenues for growth, Instagram and Twitter are on their list of the top five marketing channels to target in 2022.
Businesses Will Invest in More Content And Live Audio Chat Rooms
With 78 percent of people watching videos online every week, it is no secret that the world has transitioned to consuming video content massively across different platforms that include both long-form videos and short-form snackable video content. A study by HubSpot confirms that short-form video content gives marketers the highest ROI compared to other forms of visual content.
For this reason, more than 30 percent of companies are willing to increase their investment in videos. If you didn’t start leveraging videos yet, identify the interests and needs of your consumers and get started. Additionally, over 50% of marketers are strategizing to invest in live audio chat platforms like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse.
Demands for Social Selling ill Grow
Apart from making social media platforms interactive and engaging, social platforms started including various features to help businesses present native shopping experiences to customers. One such platform is Shoppable Instagram Stories. This feature lets customers purchase the products they like on Instagram, without having to log out of the app.
The Spark Ads feature from TikTok is another social selling avenue for marketers to reach out to customers, promote their products and increase their visibility. Slowly, other platforms are leveraging this type of feature to lock in more brands and customers to ensure a smooth, seamless and uninterrupted purchase experience.
Social Advertising Will Become More Complex
With Google planning to weed out cookie tracking by 2023, you will witness the end of third-party cookies that is around the corner. So, what does this mean for marketers? Marketing professionals will have no choice but to tweak their current strategies and focus on social advertising more than ever.
Some effective advertising options that don’t require third-party cookies are email marketing, personalized and targeted social media ads, user-generated content, influencer marketing and search engine retargeting campaigns to name a few. Marketers can use these advertising options backed up with robust data and tracking KPIs that help them understand customers and stay ahead of the competition.
How to Leverage These Social Media Marketing Trends?
Now that we’ve gone through the trends, it’s time we know how to capitalize on them. Here’re a few tips.
Create content that is relatable to connect with your audience at a deeper level. That’s what a brand promise is all about.
Use a conversational tone, so that your content can resonate with your audiences better as social media is all about interacting, connecting and engaging with your target market.
Always emphasize quality over quantity. You can achieve this by using data analytics tools and identifying what content would add value to your target audience.
Leverage videos anytime and anywhere, be it live streaming, short videos or long-form videos.
Now that we know what social media marketing trends to expect in 2022 and how to leverage these trends to grow your business, it’s time that you put them to use. However, keeping up with all the latest updates in the social platform space and creating content that engages your audience is quite a challenge.
This is why partnering with a marketing company that understands the latest developments in the social media space and your business is critical to your growth. SunYello has a team of seasoned marketing professionals who will understand your business needs and chalk out the ideal strategy to reach your business goals.
