If you want to become a dominant player in the digital marketing space, it’s important to stay current with the latest trends. If you’re not in line with the latest technologies, fashions, and customer preferences, you’ll quickly be eclipsed by your attentive and modern competitors.
Some trends emerge out of nowhere due to the radical introduction of a dynamic new technology, but others are more gradual and easier to trace. For the coming year, we're looking at the following trends as some of the most important and the most valuable to add to your campaign.
Personalization (and Hyper-personalization)
First off, there's personalization, and by extension, hyper-personalization. Personalization isn't necessarily a new marketing tactic; for many decades, companies have attempted to reach customers with more relevant messaging on an individual level.
Rather than broadcasting a simple, generic message to an audience of thousands or millions, you're coming to each individual in your audience with a message that's specifically tailored to them.
There are many advantages to this, because of:
- Relevance. When you focus on an individual, you'll be able to craft a message that is truly relevant to them. Some advertising and marketing campaigns fail simply because they are too broad; If they apply to everybody, no individual pays much attention to them.
- Engagement. In line with this, personalized content is much more engaging. Just like looking into a mirror, people are more interested in content that is reflective of their habits, their personality, and their interests.
- Uniqueness. Personalized content is instantly and automatically unique. If it's tailored to one individual, it can't be replicated. You don't have to worry as much about competition if all your content stands out on its own.
- Actionability. Research shows that personalized content is much more likely to drive action. In fact, personalized videos in retargeting campaigns increase viewing time up to 95 percent and conversion rates up to 227 percent.
Personalization is becoming easier and more accessible, which is why it's going to be so important to incorporate in your digital marketing campaigns in 2022 and beyond. Notably, Viewed.video is developing tools that make it easy even for amateurs to create video experiences that are hyper-personalized.
Today’s personalization is also much more advanced than it’s been in the past. When sending video via email, for example, companies would historically customize the video by inserting someone's name, or possibly a snippet of individually relevant text. But these days, companies can customize videos with responsive voiceovers, different photos, and dozens of other variables.
Streaming Video
Streaming video is also becoming more available and more important for campaigns. That doesn’t mean your company needs to create its own video streaming app, however; most entrepreneurs can get involved simply by including more live streaming video in their email campaigns. With the right tech tools, like those offered by Viewed.video, you can embed a streaming video in an email blast to your audience. This allows you to live stream seminars, conferences, and other events, bringing your digital audience into the fold. You could also use streaming video as part of a lecture series or to promote your latest products and services in real time.
However you choose to use streaming video, you’ll enjoy several advantages, such as:
- Comprehensibility. Video is quickly becoming the dominant medium in the digital content world, in part because of its comprehensibility. People find it much easier to view a video that's a few minutes long then to read several paragraphs of written information; this is because humans are visual creatures, and we can process visual information much quicker than written information.
- Accessibility. Video is also becoming increasingly accessible. Thanks to better internet connections and more sophisticated technology, people can view videos very easily from almost any device. On top of that, marketers are discovering just how easy it is to produce high-quality videos from scratch; because of this, there's more competitive pressure on businesses to step up their own video creation game.
- Immediacy. One of the biggest advantages of live streaming video, as opposed to static, pre-created videos, is the sense of immediacy they provide. Instead of debuting a video several days after an event, you can broadcast the event directly. Your audience gets involved the day of the occurrence, rather than losing enthusiasm over the course of several days or weeks. In fact, this is one of the best ways to take advantage of another digital marketing trend – the rise of the hybrid event.
Hybrid Events
What is a hybrid event, exactly?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, events were almost exclusively hosted in a live, physical environment, forcing attendees to leave their homes and meet up with each other in person. During the COVID-19 pandemic, everything changed, and event planners started optimizing their events for purely digital experiences.
Now that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, we're starting to enter a new era where events exist both virtually and physically. Companies are planning to host in-person events like trade shows and conferences with digital options for people who want to attend remotely. These types of events have the potential to reach much wider audiences if they're done correctly. That means hosting and promoting two slightly different versions of the same event, potentially to different audience segments.
Geofencing and Hyper-Localization
For the last several years, businesses have been practicing local optimization, fine tuning their digital marketing strategies to appeal to people within a specific city. But in 2022 and beyond, traditional local optimization may not be enough to reach your full potential.
Instead, you may need to practice geofencing, which allows you to draw imaginary boundaries around an area that represents your business’s territory. When someone crosses one of these boundaries and comes closer to being within physical proximity of your business, you can market to them specifically with push notifications, emails, or other forms of marketing. It's a simple, yet effective way to capitalize on nearby audiences.
Are you getting ready to compete with your top rivals in 2022? Do you need better tech tools to support your latest digital marketing tactics? Sign up for Viewed.video for free and start reinventing your campaigns for the modern era!
