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How will Digital Marketing change in the Future?

The digital marketing landscape changes so much and so frequently that it’s almost impossible to imagine what the future of digital marketing may offer in terms of opportunities.

During the last year or two, we’ve seen new technologies, a backlash of sorts in social media, and influencer marketing maturing from its early days as a viable and powerful marketing channel in its own right. What do I see as the biggest content marketing trends for 2022 and beyond?

My 2022 Marketing Predictions

There are 3 major trends in the digital marketing industry I think everyone will be talking about. The first is the resurgence of Content Marketing as the first thing businesses are doing in marketing. Before the pandemic startup founders and B2B SaaS marketers would first consider buying social media ads in order to grow their business..

Companies are waking up to the power of content marketing due in part to the pandemic. ~ Content Marketing Institute annual survey on Content Marketing Trends

The second bug trend is AI-generated content. We will begin to realize the opportunity of an AI-driven content marketing strategy. If 60-70% of the content we create goes unused, AI will begin to force us to reconsider what we create and why.

You may not know this but publications like the Washington Post and others have been using AI to generate templated content (think sports scores and highlights, or crime reports) for more than 2 years.

We’ve tested a few of these services and haven’t found any that can produce quality blog content or long form articles to anywhere near the level of quality required to rank for search or answer technical or professional thought leadership requirements. But that future may not be far off.

The third biggest trend is employee activation. AI will tell us what to create, but our best storytellers are our existing employees from across the business. Every company needs a strategy to activate these employees as both creators and as the most effective distribution channel to share that content.

This is what I love to call The Paradox of AI: The more the robots tell us what to do, the more we will need our internal experts to create and share that content.

There are a few things we’re pretty clear about. Content marketing isn’t going to go anywhere for a while for sure. But what other digital marketing trends might we see as we head towards 2022?

Voice-powered Everything

Smart speakers and “assistants” have been around for a while but they really started to take off in 2017 and 2018 as people have lost the self-consciousness of talking to their phones and a range of new consumer devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home have appeared on the market.

There’s no reason for the trend in mobile to stop growing, and this hands-free technology will become an increasingly standard way that users choose to interact with their devices. It’s estimated that over half of all search queries are powered by voice search.

With this growth in voice search powered smart devices will come more opportunities to market to the people that own them. Amazon already spotted this opportunity when it started offering cheaper Kindle devices in exchange for agreeing to receive marketing communications. Targeted Alexa ads are already in the pipeline and the other devices will be sure to follow.

AI-Powered Marketing and Support Technology

Artificial intelligence has been expanding what’s possible in the world of digital marketing for quite a while now, but we’re going to see exponential leaps in what this technology is capable of over the next few years.

Chatbots will become a customer service standard and start replacing live agents more and more frequently as machine learning algorithms grow more complex and are able to emulate human beings with almost spooky accuracy.

Marketing is becoming more conversational and personalized and chatbots enable you to take advantage of this trend without additional strain on your manpower and resources.

AI is also being used in advertising. While it hasn’t quite achieved human levels of creativity, Google is already running ads powered by AI to optimize campaigns by identifying the best-performing ad designs and copy and automatically adjusting based on user engagement.

The Future of Social Media

You may think social media is already pervasive, but it still has room to grow. While the future of social media might come in the form of something, well, more social, the growth of these platforms is not likely to subside any time soon.

Social media will continue to make its presence known in every area of our lives and become truly integrated with both on and offline services.

In an episode of the dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror, social media has spilled out of the screen and into the real world as individuals rate their interactions with others and are awarded better housing, jobs, and social status based on their overall rating.

Science fiction? Maybe for now, but the future probably isn’t so far away. Most of the apps on your phone are probably already sharing data with your social media networks and it’s now common for employers and recruiters to screen social media profiles before interviews.

What does this mean for marketers? A deeper understanding of each customer as an individual and the opportunity to offer highly targeted offers and services, as the AI algorithms used in social media grow increasingly sophisticated.

The Rise of Micro-influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has already grown huge in recent years with top influencers on platforms like Instagram and YouTube attracting millions of followers and making a six-figure income from their deals with brands.

However influencer marketing is still in its infancy and while it offers great ROI compared to more traditional advertising channels, there are some issues to be ironed out.

Fake followers are currently a problem that’s still being resolved, and there have been some notable occurrences when brand/influencer relationships have backfired in a bad way.

Big name influencers are also starting to lose their power as they take on more and more sponsored posts, reducing the authenticity and impact of their recommendations.

As consumers continue to value individual recommendations over being marketed at, it’s going to make sense to invest more in “micro-influencers” – those social media users who have a much smaller but dedicated following and can deliver truly authentic marketing messages to a trusting audience.

Influencers’ power will be measured not by the sheer number of followers they boast, but their personal relationships with each individual follower.

Augmented Reality Becomes Commonplace

Remember the Pokémon Go craze of 2016? The mobile game was not only a great example of how augmented reality can be used in video games, but also a marketing opportunity, as businesses jumped on the chance to sell to customers trying to catch a Pokémon or two on their doorstep.

Augmented reality is not just a fun gimmick for gamers. It’s being used more and more as a tool for brands to reach customers. Ikea now offers a virtual reality catalog where you can place pieces of furniture in your own home, and fashion brands are starting to use augmented reality to allow their customers to try on outfits virtually in the comfort of their own homes.