Open for business
If you are like most and have returned, if not to the physical office, but your desk and workspace at the least, then carving out time in your schedule to craft your marketing for 2022 will set you up for success.
If your plan hasn’t included digital before, there are so many new functionalities across the platforms that you may not be aware of with last year seeing more changes to Facebook in 3 months than in the last 3 years! Planning for the next 12 months of your marketing is important but you have to be willing to take advantage of it and leverage the platforms most beneficial to your business.
But is it too quiet to market for business?
Marketing is like a seed and with the continual planting of seeds, you would hope for a thriving garden. Although the markets may slow at times, it is the quieter periods when keeping your brand message strong is the most important. Too many times we see marketing budgets slashed and ads put on hold in an effort to adjust to the market, which is a big mistake. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in South Australia recently released the findings of a report on when brands stop advertising and showed the sales were down 16% after 1 year on average and down 58% on average after 5 years. You can read the full report on their website here.
The trends to track
Creating content with value is a no brainer, if you are just creating content for the sake of it then you will quickly lose audience and digital value. Utilise tools like Answer the Public, RSS feeds and social listening to look for trends and be part of the audience’s conversation, then team it with punchy graphics and imagery that aligns with the message and brand. Don’t forget, user generated content (UGC) is gold content and brands should be capitalising on it where possible – when your target audience are your biggest cheerleaders, that is when your message is the loudest and a trend for 2022 that needs to be strategically included in your planning.
There are no surprises that video content has remained at the forefront of favourability across social media (Falcon.io, 2022) with Instagram reels taking charge and long-form videos on LinkedIn engaging audiences more. If you haven’t tried video yet then now is the time to start – if you aren’t posting video content then you are missing out on a huge audience.
The cookies are gone! We saw Google give third-party cookies the flick recently which means that the first party cookies are now at the forefront of digital marketing. Hubspot says 41% of marketers now see tracking the right data as their biggest challenge and 44% of marketers increasing their spend to reach the same goals as before. This teamed with iOS updates that have reduced data tracking across devices has proved a challenge for most marketers to hold onto current audience numbers.
Google My Business has emerged as not just a business listing anymore – are you taking advantage of your search profile? The average business is found in 1009 searches per month with 84% of these coming from discovery searches. What’s more, on average 56% of actions on GMB listings are website visits – that’s one source of traffic you don’t want to ignore.
So where do we start?
While some marketers are happy to outsource their digital marketing completely, we see a range of involvement with various touch points. You can decide to have a little or as much involvement in the doing as you like based on resources and skills available. We have seen all sorts of pandemic false starts, new normals and no normal to the point we are not stuffing around anymore. Marketing in 2022 will be a no holds approach and we kick this off with The Good, The Bad & The Ugly training where you can arm yourself with the latest digital marketing trends and possibilities in the ever growing social media landscape. Our suite of Social Media Training for the first quarter includes Google Business, Instagram updates, Facebook campaigns and LinkedIn advertising. If it is time for you to get Seriously Digital, without the BS, join our iconic digital 10 month program, 3 hours once a month where we provide you with the practical tools you can actually use to make your digital marketing work.
Seriously caffeinated
As always, if you want to discover more about the possibilities of using digital marketing in your business, we start with coffee. Feel free to reach out to me at meredith@socialmediaaok.com.au or our contact form here
