TikTok is the 3rd most used social network worldwide after Facebook and Instagram. In 2020, eMarketer predicts that TikTok will reach 755 million monthly users, compared to Instagram with 1.28 billion users and Facebook with almost 2.1 billion users.
You can see below the top 5 most used social networks by number of users:
There is a lot of talk about different TikTok trends this year, but here are the most interesting trending TikToks in 2022 with all the details you need to know.
Instagram added different features to facilitate the collaboration between content creators and brands with the new affiliate program, shops (new program for creators), paid partnership label, branded content partnership, and the new Instagram subscriptions.
There are also some big changes to Instagram’s video formats, the new types of feeds, and other Instagram trends for this year that will bring an important plus (hopefully) to Instagram.
Because coronavirus has accelerated the digital transformation of consumers, more and more businesses have started testing / growing their presence online.
Digital marketing is not only about social media channels, and a lot of marketers recommend focusing (more) on your SEO strategy in 2022 and trying to produce content that is relevant to your niche and that has concrete answers for your (potential) clients’ questions.
This year we have our 8th edition of digital marketing trends for 2022, in which 20+ top marketers tell our Hot in Social Media community their predictions for this year. A big Thank You to all these marketers who share their predictions and suggestions with our audience for this year.
So without further ado, if you want to have successful digital marketing campaigns in 2022, I believe you’ll have a lot to gain from these recommendations from top marketers.
What are the Most Important Digital Marketing Trends in 2022?
Andy Crestodina
Co-Founder / CMO – Orbit Media
LinkedIn Newsletters are going to be huge in 2022. For the lucky few who get the “Create a Newsletter” button, LinkedIn will promote it connections, followers and an even wider audience, who can subscribe with a single click. Then it will email them every article you add to the platform.
The reach is amazing. In the first 10 months, we grown to 100k+ subscribers. Suddenly in 2022, LinkedIn has become a much more important part of B2B content strategies.
Marji J. Sherman
Vice President, Digital – Cognito Media
Focus on SERPS
Not only does your business showing up in results matter to a consumer, but so does how your business appears in search results. While SEO is crucial for a brand, especially when integrated fully across digital, sophisticated SEO experts are now hyper-focused on search engine results pages (SERPs.) With Google holding 80% of the SERP space, Google My Business is a substantial claim, along with editing knowledge panels, video carousels, featured snippets, and images.
Interactively Design
Gone are the days of making a quick photo in Photoshop and adding it to every social media channel. Gone are the days of using “just” an image. Consumers are craving to interact with brand content to have experiences rather than be directly “told” something. Interactive design adds another layer to purposing content for each digital channel. Not only does the image and copy need to be specific, but so does the way the content is interactive. Recent research shows that interactive content can increase conversions and keep the consumer engaged over a longer lifetime.
Be Mature
We are a decade past a business just getting started on a Facebook page and learning the basics of social media. A competitive company must enter 2022 as a digitally mature organization or forget its competitive edge. This means all employees should be educated on the ins and outs of digital marketing, especially when it comes to employee advocacy. It also means growing your team to a place where you are no longer putting the nuts and bolts together but are able and willing to apply the newest digital technologies to your digital world. It’s not too late to become mature, but I would do it quickly this year if you want to come out ahead.
Timothy Hughes
Co-founder and CEO
In 2021, Marketing realised that the old ways of interruption marketing (advertising, cold calling and email marketing) just didn’t work anymore. With conservative businesses like Bank of America Merrill Lynch announcing the end of cold calling and Hubspot announcing that email marketing (for a second year running) had a 98% failure rate, the door on these old ways closed and closed for good. The problem for marketing is, what do they do now? What we saw in 2021 was Marketing make a grasp for digital advertising and with digital advertising having an overall failure rate of 98.8% it didn’t make up for the short fall in leads, but sounded good to the leadership. The C-Suite know this isn’t working and are demanding action.
The most important digital marketing trend in 2022 will be the the realisation that the buyer has changed and they are empowered. The don’t want to be interrupted, they want to be empowered with insight, they want to be entertained. These buyers are on social and the research shows they are not looking for brochures, in fact they laugh at these old companies paying for ads and getting their employees to post brochures and brochureware. And business leaders know that it gets no engagement and is a waste of time and budget.
The modern buyer wants insight, they want to engage with experts and they want conversations, after all, that is what social is about, being social.
It is the businesses that anchor in this and build strategies (not tactics) and build methodologies that connected this use of social media and revenue and EBITDA.As with all work on social businesses must be able to answer two questions: 1. How many meetings / conversations / proposals, etc did we get from our activity on social media? and how much revenue / EBITDA did we get from our activity on social media?
In 2022 leadership teams will start asking these questions and expect budget invested in social media, driving pipeline and won business.
Ted Rubin
Co-Author of Retail Relevancy, Speaker, Strategic Advisor, Provocateur
Much of the current spending in digital marketing is at the very bottom of the funnel. There are literally billions of dollars being spent to target the right consumer in the right place at the right time, and much of it is completely wasted due to a simple fact: consumers hate it. The common use case for some game-changing ad tech platform is thus: “Imagine a consumer walking into a bar and at that exact moment she is targeted with an ad for Stella because we’ve got a pixel that connects to her GPS location.” Would you like that as a consumer? Hell no, and yet marketers are rushing to chase this tactic although it potentially causes damage to all the hard work they have put into building their brand. In choosing this bombardment of the customer everywhere they go we are repeating history, because during the mass marketing years we did not pay attention to the downside of “spray and pray” marketing either. Worse than just being annoying, it is damaging to the customer experience. As marketers we need to start thinking more like matchmakers than hunters to stay relevant to shoppers.
Just Because You CAN Market to Someone, Does Not Mean You Should.Given the choice between developing a marketing idea that dazzles fellow marketers but falls flat with customers, or cultivating a no-frills idea that works because it gives customers exactly what they want/need even though it isn’t flashy, which option do you lean toward? Many marketers, if marketing. They may talk about putting the customer first, but actions say otherwise.
There are many reasons that marketers overcomplicate their perception of what customers want. Maybe they got into marketing because it stokes their creativity, and they want to demonstrate that creativity to the world. A perfectly reasonable person being honest, will choose the first option, whether it’s because they think it will impress their peers, advance their career, establish their position as an influencer, or for one of many other reasons.
Building your personal brand is a natural, worthy goal for any professional, but not when it comes at the expense of the larger brand that you represent. Too often we see marketers who, regardless of intent, view the world only from the perspective of goal in many cases, but not when flexing those creative muscles leads to a lesser experience for the people who buy the brand’s product.
Often, it’s a case of putting the marketer’s own desires ahead of the team and the brand that they represent. They want their hard work to be recognized, they are angling for a spot on the speaker circuit, or they simply focus on self at the expense of the big picture. Regardless of the reason, it leads to marketing that’s bad for the brand, the consumer, and ultimately the marketer as well.
The fact of the matter is that brands are running headlong into brand equity destruction through incessant programmatic and digital spamming. The rise of retargeting and digital yield techniques is killing brands and brand equity for the long-term. How many managers bother signing up for their own email distribution lists, or shop their brands from an anonymous browser to experience what their customers are being subjected to?
We have data coming out of our ears, so tracking the results of our marketing efforts in terms of dollars and cents is becoming easier and easier. However, all these efforts only measure the upside of banging consumers over the head (how many more clicks, shares, engagements and sales we get).
No regard is given to the downside numbers. What we are not tracking is the point at which our customers turn from just annoyed to fed up with our bot stalking and algorithm tweaking. And even if we could come up with a KPI for the flip side, it will be difficult to analytically compare.
So, what’s a marketer to do? We need to spend as much time finding ways to track the negative effect of our marketing efforts as we do the positive ones. We now know that our marketing has both positive and negative effects on our consumers, so we need to study all of it. By controlling how we market to our customers and finding ways to add value rather than beating them over the head, we can have a less disruptive effect on their lives and a more positive experience with our brands.
Despite becoming numb to the onslaught of messaging, the overall perception of brands that are engaging in such digital behavior is declining dramatically… to maintain relevancy, brands need to get back to the basics of putting themselves in the shoes of the customer.
Shelley Grierson
Head of Product
Businesses that are highlighting their sustainability policies and that have an environmental focus are becoming increasingly influential. For example, the ethical product industry in the UK achieved over £100 billion in sales for the first time ever. So green credentials are becoming increasingly necessary for building a following, driving engagement as well as achieving better business growth.
In the same vein, businesses that are transparent about their company culture and diversity policies, particularly through social channels, are also benefiting from increased engagement.
Experience continues to be an element that makes businesses stand out. There is no point in creating a seamless social media experience for it to fall over when a user then moves onto another platform to continue that experience. So a focus on cross-platform experience to recreate positive instore experiences online should be at the forefront of every businesses digital strategy.
Micro influencing is continuing to rise, particularly within Tik Tok. This is where smaller creators are reaching particularly large, new audiences. In this way, cancel culture is something that businesses need to be aware of on social media as well – as weighing in on certain topics can cause mass boycotts from within these influencer spheres.
On Linkedin we are seeing Poll and Audio features being rolled out, to increase engagement and change the way the platform and experience delivers.
The drive on social platforms is certainly toward keeping users within the platform. Instead of using social media pages to drive users toward websites, social accounts and platforms are increasingly controlling experiences through built-in marketplaces.
So the challenge for businesses then becomes how to optimise user experiences across multiple platforms. Many users these days will respond to an advert and complete a purchase without leaving the social platform at all.
Business strategies must reflect these changing behaviours and platform controls, to ensure that their own user experience is seamless and reflects the brand message appropriately.
Neal Schaffer
Author, The Age of Influence
Coronavirus has further accelerated the digital transformation of the consumer, but most businesses are chasing after shiny new objects instead of focusing on what is tried and tested.
I believe what is old is new again, and with around 93% of all web traffic being contributed by search engines, I think its time to take a fresh look at our web content and build resourceful and authoritative blog content that answers questions that people genuinely have. I challenge any company to look at relevant search engine results for your business and discover all of the poor, old, or irrelevant content that appears. That gives you a window of opportunity to rank through your expertise and gain the website traffic you deserve.
That’s why I remain focused on blogging and SEO for my business as well as those of my clients.
Anna Bennett
CEO
If you want more eyeballs on your website, then consider video marketing because it will be a game-changer in 2022. It’s not just about how much (the quantity) you post to court your audience on Pinterest, it’s also about the quality, meaning creating content that will inspire and connect with your audience. Focus on uniqueness and quality content that helps people solve their problems. Make it engaging, relevant, and informative. Simply put, it’s not about you.
Influencer marketing will continue to grow. In fact, Pinterest is investing $20 million for Creator Rewards and other initiatives to support creators. Pinterest is helping creators connect with brands. As of July 2021, Pinterest launched new ways for content creators to earn more money by making Idea Pins shoppable. You can earn commissions through affiliate links and partner with brands on sponsored content. Heck, you don’t even need a website if you don’t want to set one up. If you’ve always dreamed of being an influencer or a brand ambassador this is your chance to make that happen as a Pinterest Creator.
Dan Gingiss
Chief Experience Officer – The Experience Maker LLC
Remember that a digital advertisement is often the first time a customer is exposed to your brand, so it’s the “experience before the customer experience.” Make sure it’s remarkable! And don’t do anything that you don’t enjoy yourself… pop-up ads, anyone?
Prospects are so inundated with marketing… 6 million blogs worldwide daily, 500 million tweets, more than 258 BILLION emails every single day… that’s your competition. I recommend to clients that they focus on creating remarkable experiences for their existing customers instead, because when they do that, their customers become their best marketers! The best way to get to word-of-mouth marketing isn’t via a viral video or a snarky social media post (otherwise everyone would do it), it’s by creating memorable experiences that your customers can’t wait to talk about with friends, family, and colleagues.
Virginia Zuloaga
Digital Marketer – Founder of Brieffin Consulting –
Co-Founder of CreaGeen
The world’s largest professional network is growing, growing, growing.
LinkedIn has recently gone through one of the major redesigns in its overall look and features of the last five years, making the user experience more appealing, and comprehensive, while placing the focus on community engagement.
From the “Super admin view” perspective, the array of possibilities for creating and sharing content is the more integrated of them all, compared to other social media networking platforms.
Less is more.
However, and despite all the options and posts-per-minute that are being shared, the “less is more” concept is at the forefront of their look and feel, making it a pleasant experience to navigate.
One factor that also contributes to this, is the fact that all through the years LinkedIn has been seen, and used, as a high-quality content focused network, where professionals have been educated to create and exchange valuable content with other professionals: Quality over quantity. Insightful instead of noisy.
When it comes to reputation and thought leadership, there is no better place to be.
Honest experiences.
Although it is easy to get distracted by the latest digital trends, and “shiny” platforms, most of the business growth especially in the B2B and industrial sectors still comes from the foundational tools of marketing.
These foundations are still at the core of the corporate values that are consistently being translated to the clients or end users online and offline: transparency, availability, professionalism, and quality. These are trends that will never die.
The digital way of doing things.
Digital jobs. Digital tools. Digital skills. Digital communications.
Although for some companies this decodes into the “new way of doing things”, influenced by the radical changes that we all went through in 2020 and that are still ongoing, for others, keeping the “digital” at the core of our daily business since day one has proven to be effective in incredible ways. The digital way of doing things has always been a booster of creativity and talent acquisition at global levels, while allowing for multicultural working and networking environments, to serve clients globally. All of this from the comfort of your technological device.
Adelina Noge
Content Marketing Team Lead
Everyone in the digital marketing space knows just how hard it is to please the almighty Google and make your content rank as high as you can. We’ve been talking more and more about video marketing these past few years, but up until now, we couldn’t see exactly just how impactful a video embedded in a blog article or a landing page can be. As a result, video marketing and having a strong YouTube channel were mainly seen as a “nice to have,” not necessarily a “must-have.”
My advice for anyone looking to expand their digital marketing efforts in 2022 is to invest in a good video marketing strategy. Think beyond a Youtube strategy. Invest in videos you would also use in your Google Ads campaigns, social media content, blog content, or even embedding SEO-optimized videos on specific landing pages. Of course, you should also consider the specifics of each communication channel.
Andrew Warden
Chief Marketing Officer
Remember this: if something only lasts for just 1 year, it’s not a trend, it is just a fad.
While there are a lot of things going on across the digital space (ex: the rise and fall of Clubhouse) — the majority come and go as quickly as an Instagram Story.
Here are 5 digital marketing trends that will have a bigger impact for the years to come:
- Privacy-driven marketing
- Changing social media landscape
- Be human, no, really
- Conscious marketing
- Join the metaverse
You can read more details about all of this trends on my post written for Semrush’s blog.
Jessika Phillips
Award Winning Marketing Strategist, International Speaker & Passionate Founder of NOW Marketing Group
The first wave of web was data, the second was social media engagement and now as we enter the third wave, the metaverse, it’s a co-creation – an immersive evolution of the web today.
As the way we consume content changes, this means the engagement businesses and creators’ currently model with their communities are going to look a lot different. How businesses show up and market brands will need to evolve as well.
In 2022 and beyond, smart companies will awaken to these core areas of opportunity to build momentum for their (future) customers:
- Focus on Culture -Starting from the Inside Out – the brand cannot be the only one sharing it. The true test is having team members willingly and actively being your evangelists.
- Live Video Selling – a great opportunity to build a new pillar of engaged and loyal customers.
- Unfiltered Brand Communication – brands will begin sharing “unfiltered” content, communication, and conversation.
- Social Audio – podcasts, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and Facebook will continue to grow but not only via social posting but in the inbox, too. More and more individuals prefer the intimacy of audio with the convenience of not having video (ex: more voice memos).
Stephanie Nelson
SEO & Social Media Maven
1. Finding work-arounds for new privacy rules.
A lot of changes have come about or are coming in consumer privacy. Unfortunately for marketers, these changes take away a good bit of data they use to optimize digital ad performance and increase their ROI/ROAS. Marketers are going to need to find ways to maximize the data still available and/or get highly strategic with how and where they spend their ad dollars.
2. Playing the algorithms’ games will need to be a focus.
Everything online is run by an algorithm now – the ads and organic results you see in when you do a search on a search engine, the content and order in which you see it in social media feeds, etc. Marketers will need to listen and learn from their audiences to know what content they WANT to see, what content they engage with, in order to remain relevant and seen.
Ravi Shukle
Founder Social Media Agency Karma Wolf
The most important digital trend is an old but classic one and that’s to focus on Google SEO. This means making sure in 2022 that your blog content, social content, video content is all created based on what people are searching for. This will help your business stay top of mind and relevant, compared to the old way of creating content based on what you thought customers needed.
You can use Google trends and keyword tools to determine the best topics to base your digital and social media content on. To give you the edge, you want to focus on customer pain points – your brand and business should be the solution.
Shane Barker
Digital Strategist
In 2022, the focus of marketing is on people.
For instance, Google is delivering more answers within the search results via FAQs, Rich Snippets, and Featured Snippets. The new results format focuses on people, objects, and things, not just keywords or links to websites.
Virtual assistants are part of this trend, including the new Google Assistant with its 3 billion answers per month. Humans want to contact people in services directly rather than go via a service homepage.
For brands, this means that customer experiences will be more important than ever and you need to focus on every interaction with the customer through all channels.
If you want to excel at digital marketing, you should prioritize customer experience management using user segmentation and personalization across channels.
You may like to check out some omnichannel marketing tips and examples for reference!
Miruna Dragomir
CMO
Reels, TikTok, and whatever similar format may come. The fact that people are hooked is no longer a question. That aside, brands have started to find their voice in these formats too. It seemed like marketers would have hard time finding brands’ place on TikTok. But I’m now seeing these formats fully integrated in social media calendars. Starbucks, Gucci, Wendy’s, Ryanair are just some examples of doing it right.
I’d also point out a second aspect influenced by the growth of TikTok and Reels: the lifespan of challenges/trends. A social media trend or challenge can now become a worldwide sensation in a day. And be over just as quickly. So real-time marketing is less and less a nice-to-have and more a must for brands.
Maria Ganta
Marketing Expert
Video Marketing
In my opinion, video marketing is the number one digital marketing trend that marketers should integrate into their social media strategy in 2022.
Create live streams on Facebook or Instagram or upload a native video on LinkedIn or YouTube.
Video is a valuable channel to engage with your connections, share your knowledge uniquely, or repurpose existing content.
Randy Milanovic
CEO and Founder
1. Protecting your privacy. Being mindful of what you post on Facebook. Blocking precise location targetting on your phone. We’re learning that the amount of information companies like these have on us is incredible. Apple’s decision to transparently display linked information in the AppStore was a solid step in the right direction. Their move was so bold, Google and Facebook raged. Google then took a step in that direction itself by planning to block 3rd party cookies in Chrome starting this year (’22). Sounds great, though not as altruistic as it sounds…Google’s primary reason for it is to head off users from requesting even more privacy. Check what all browsers see: https://webkay.robinlinus.com/ Learn how to remove your digital footprint https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/delete-digital-footprint-completely/
2. Transitioning from graphic design (presenting aesthetics) to user experience design (refining interactions) to product design (building what they want).
3. Saying goodbye to the sales funnel (finally) and crafting user-centric journeys, or flows, through your content based on visitor intent.
Julia Campbell
Digital Marketing Expert and Podcaster
The trend that I love most going into 2022 is putting a more human face on our communications. We don’t want to connect with brands and corporate logos. Everyday people like to see faces, to see humanity, to hear stories. What is your brand’s story? How are you conveying this in your digital marketing? Insert more of your own personality and your voice into your marketing and reap the benefits.
Christina Garnett
Senior Marketing Manager, Offline Community and Advocacy HubSpot
DAOs will continue to be a major topic for brands, creators, and community builders. It will be one of the more accepted parts of Web3 as people learn more and want to gravitate towards projects that offer more value and community connection.
The mental toll of social media will be a continued conversation and brands and platforms (fingers crossed) will take action to lessen the negative experience for users so people don’t delete their accounts.
Jeff Korhan
Small Business Speaker, Author and Founder of Landscape Digital Institute
There has never been more running room for taking an idea and building a successful business around it with digital marketing. This is especially true for creators, and it’s why a leading 2022 digital marketing trend will be hyper-niched brands and businesses.
Nowadays, it’s not enough for a business to be better. To gain traction with digital marketing, you must be the best, and that often means picking a lane that you can dominate. This is most commonly a hyper-focused niche that can be uniquely served.
Consumers often complain that nobody is listening to them. Google Reviews are an abundant source for these comments that can be the difference between a me-too business or the next overnight success.
Viveka von Rosen
Co-Founder and Chief Visibility Officer
“Time is of the essence” has never been more true…. The Pandemic has changed how we perceive time – commute time, flex time, family time. And many of us have come to the realization, with the loss of loved ones, the loss of business, the loss of the old way of doing things, that time is our most precious commodity.
And let’s face it – in many cases, digital marketing just creates MORE noise and time suck.
With this realization I hope savvy Digital marketers will create more creative and impactful content that can be both shared and consumed in less time.
Our company, Vengreso, has even created our own auto text expander software, FlyMSG.io, to help increase our client’s (and now the world’s) productivity.
Vengreso works with sales and marketing teams helping them to create more relevant conversations with more qualified leads. But what we were noticing, is that when it came to prospecting, and sharing digital content with their prospects, most were just throwing digital content on the wall in a spray and pray effort – wasting everyone’s most valuable resource – time!
By creating effective scripts and then giving them a tool to share those scripts and resources with a few keystrokes, we have given our sellers back time, and given their buyers content that is more relevant and impactful for them. (This also cuts down on lead time, meeting times, etc.)
Anything marketers can do to give sellers and buyers their time back – that’s what’s going to trend in 2022!
Ingrid Kibler
Head of Global Social Media
Simple, seamless integration. As the physical world blends more and more closely with the digital world, it’s more important than ever to deliver an all-encompassing user experience unlike no other.
This can be accomplished by integrating all pieces of a brand’s digital presence in a way that is simple and effective. Teams that can organize themselves internally to reach this level of collaboration will push their companies to the forefront of the competition.
