It’s here – 2022! Will this year be more of what we know or will we be getting back to normality? If it’s anything like how 2020-2021 have been, then being prepared and ready to adapt to more changes is a wise move. As a team we have put together some of our predictions of Digital Marketing Trends and what we think will happen this year in the digital space, from platform updates to where brands will look to advertise.
You can also listen to our 2022 predictions for Paid Social here.
Paid Social
With the Facebook platform still remaining relatively unpredictable in certain sectors, we will see more brands shift portions of their spend to other platforms when advertising. These will include Tiktok, Reddit, Quora, Twitter, etc. Think about what you are advertising, who you are trying to attract, and where this audience is based. For example, Tiktok is great for capturing the Gen Z audience so look at your content and see how you can make it work for new platforms.
We have seen towards the end of the year interest-based audiences performing the best compared to LAL’s due to losing data. With these audiences working the best we should see Facebook add new interests to their stock allowing us to target more people at a more granular level.
With the volatility in consumer purchasing habits these past 18 months – from people only being able to purchase online, to brick and mortar stores reopening – it’s going to be more important than ever to be reactive to how these habits may continue to change in 2022. We predict the importance of media spend flexibility to be a top priority when planning media strategies in the coming year.
With Facebook’s change late last year to ‘Meta’ we are also certain that this will bring further changes to their advertising platform, potentially with broader scope and new opportunities. Exactly what those are remain to be seen but it’s certainly an area to keep a keen eye on.
Our final prediction is rising costs. This is really a continuation of a long-term trend where costs (CPMs) have risen year on year, particularly for popular placements such as the newsfeed. We don’t see this trend changing so as is always the case, keep track of your CPMs and take that into account when making year-on-year comparisons.
Paid Search
With Paid Search, we observed trends such as ‘from home’ skyrocket towards the end of November, which is a similar pattern to what we saw last year. With e-commerce brands in mind, search terms such as ‘home delivery’ saw a steady rise moving into December.
We predict that this trend will not slow down any time soon, so it is important that any keyword research conducted takes into account the rise in ‘home’-related keyword volume going into 2022. Of course, a lot of this will be dependent on any future covid restrictions, so make sure you’re tuned into what’s happening and try to anticipate how this might impact certain search trends.
Another huge thing will be automation! We’ll no longer be able to create expanded text ads going into June 2022, so we’ll be seeing a lot of testing of ad formats such as responsive search ads, dynamic search ads, and more. It’ll be important to include priority keywords in your headlines as Google will be controlling how these ads show to your users.
We also predict that smart bidding will become more prominent in 2022, purely because Google is slowly but surely adapting its platform to produce higher conversion rates with the aid of machine learning. Make sure you are testing smart bidding in a few of your campaigns before the New Year hits!
With a number of advertisers struggling on Facebook last year, we are also seeing a trend of shifting spend into YouTube. Although YouTube has been a popular platform for some time, as many brands start to spread their spend across additional platforms we believe YouTube will be top of the list for many.
Drop us a message and let us know what you think will happen this year and if there are any upcoming Digital Marketing Trends you think we should know about.
