5 things you need to include in your marketing strategy in 2022

Five of the most important things to consider when planning your marketing strategy in 2022. It’s not all about NFTs and Influencer Marketing. For many, it’s about getting the basics right first.

Everyone wants to feel like a brand is speaking to them and them alone. The more you’re able to personalise your B2C content strategy and marketing messaging, the more effective it will be. Exploring the behaviours of your target audience allows for far more effective grouping of those targets.

Behavioral Segmentation is about separating audiences into groups based upon their activities, their actions, their page views, etc. Behaviour groups can act very differently, despite being in the same age or lifestyle demographic. Understanding these groups, how different messages connect with different people is at the heart of personalised marketing. It’s a little more than just making sure your emails are addressed to a person’s own name (although don’t dismiss that, it totally works too.)

Marketers should look for ways to make their messaging personal. Don’t sell to a wide audience, sell to Alan who has 2 children, works 40 hours a week as a builders merchant and who’s favourite food is pizza. Know your audience.

It’s becoming more important than ever to take a ‘data-first’ approach to marketing, in order to achieve cut through and drive engagement from your target audiences. Understanding market trends and audience interactions is key to shaping effective, engaging PR stories, and should be included in any digital PR strategy.

The most popular content platforms, including Google and Facebook are looking to more tightly control audience targeting as they simultaneously move away from manual bidding capabilities. Meanwhile, their algorithms have become more advanced and far better at understanding which ad images and what types of copy will drive the best click-through and conversion rates. This, after all, is how they make their money.

As well as data driving new creative it’s important that companies analyze the performance metrics of existing creative to identify where the gaps are. This allows businesses (and agencies) to design new creative and shape new copy that directly impacts those poor performing metrics.

Gone are the days when a brand benefited from saying how fantastic they are, or how unique their ideas are, without the data and the evidence to back it up. People see through disingenuous messaging so much more easily today than they used to. Knowing your brand, and understanding your own voice is more important than ever. The evidence that ‘brand honesty’ has a positive effect on engagement and ultimately sales is clear. With more and more brands focussing on honest, open and empathetic messaging rather than a ‘hard sell’, those that aren’t will likely stand out (and not in a good way).

Remember, audiences are naturally sceptical and question everything they see. If you can’t back up what you’re saying, don’t say it! It’s that simple.

Businesses change. They grow and they change directions, and as a result the kind of messaging they put out changes too. Marketers need to ask themselves if they’re fully aware of all of those old blog posts and pieces of content that might not quite fit with their current brand values, or that might not be the quality of your current posts. The chances are, if you’ve been writing content for a while, some of your old posts might not be of the same quality. While a dip in quality isn’t necessarily the end of the world, a misstep in messaging or tone can reflect badly on your brand, so it’s worth spending a little time checking through that old content.

It feels like every article about driving more traffic and engagement is pushing people to use more video, and there is a very simple reason. Video works. It is one of the most important tools at the disposal of any brand looking to connect with tier audiences and drive engagement.

Video forges strong bonds with consumers and engages with audiences far more than text and image based content. This in turn leads to more engagement with a brand and way more interaction. Most platforms are actively promoting video content above image and text based content, and social media algorithms are designed to give videos far higher reach. The long and short of it is, if you’re not currently utilising video in your content marketing strategy, you’re missing out.

The five of the most important things to consider when planning your marketing strategy in 2022 was compiled by DA Creative Studio, the disruptive brand and digital PR agency.