Marketing is a constantly evolving field that requires continual education in order to stay on top of new trends. There are certain aspects of marketing that become less relevant as years go on, and new tools, platforms, and ideas that take center stage. In order to be a good digital marketer and provide great strategies for ourselves and others, we need to know how to adapt to new knowledge and create flexible plans.
As we move into a new year, there are new 2022 marketing insights that we can use to improve marketing strategies for the upcoming year. In this article, we’ll discuss seven different insights that we’ve learned from this year and explore how they can be applied to new situations moving forward. It’s important to make sure that your 2022 marketing insights can be used effectively to inspire new change and development in your organization.
Insight 1: Integrations are essential
Even though marketing platforms and other digital tools are becoming more involved with different features, there is no one platform that can do absolutely everything. That’s why having integrations matters. You don’t have just a single tool in order to market your business, and the multiple tools you do rely on need to work together. If you have tools that can’t integrate and connect together, then you can risk incorrect data entry issues, missed opportunities, and bloated costs.
Integrations are digital processes that connect tools together and share data between different platforms. These integrations help keep every tool up to date and ensure that your entire team has the same data to work with. In fact, integrations are so important that a MarTech Replacement Survey from 2022 stated, “Integration capabilities is the #1 most important factor in choosing a replacement tool”.
As you move into the upcoming year, make sure you look at your current tech stack and see if there are any platforms or resources you use that lack integration capabilities. If there are, consider exploring alternatives that have modern integration capabilities as a replacement option.
Insight 2: Data at the center
Data has always been an important part of digital marketing, and this trend is only continuing to grow in 2022 and beyond. It’s becoming more necessary to centralize and manage your data more effectively than in previous years. Rather than collecting data and not doing anything with it, there is an increased need to use data and drive actionable insights from the information you’ve collected.
You can use data to help you understand valuable things about your business, such as where you can invest your marketing dollars and which initiatives provide the best return on your investment. By harnessing the power of your data rather than letting it go to waste, you can paint a better picture of your customers and their behavior. It also allows you to tailor your digital marketing projects directly with data-driven insights.
Insight 3: Measuring ROI is a focus
Return on investment, or ROI, is a measure of whether the amount of money and time you dedicate into a campaign or initiative provides more results than your initial investment. While knowing ROI has always been important, it’s becoming even more focused in modern digital marketing efforts.
In the past, marketing ROI was hard to quantify. It was difficult to know whether investments in things like blogging or social media posts directly related to an increase in sales. But with modern artificial intelligence and automation tools, you can measure and understand your results with much more accuracy than before. This helps you identify what is and isn’t working for your brand, which helps drive better strategies and campaign planning.
Insight 4: Marketing software empowers local businesses to be more efficient
Focusing your efforts on local search and your local area is becoming more and more popular. While some big brands might appeal to a global or national audience, most business owners are more concerned with their immediate area. Having a marketing tool that understands how important local search is and can help you improve your local SEO and marketing efforts is a major advantage.
You want to make sure that any platform you use for your local business is feature-rich and interconnected with other tools. You don’t want to invest in a platform that only does a few things but ultimately falls short of your marketing goals. You also want to find a tool that fits into the budget of a small business owner rather than a large platform designed for enterprises. Tools like Surefire Local are designed to have powerful integration features and come at a price point that works for people trying to find a local audience.
Insight 5: Optimize your message for the customer journey
Marketing is all about messaging. Your messages need to appeal to the customers and audiences you want to attract, which makes the language and timing of your marketing messages even more important. When you work on creating powerful communications, you also want to focus those messages on the customer journey that every client and customer goes through.
Marketing is always more effective when it is personalized. Rather than feeling like one in a crowd, personalized messaging feels more intimate and evokes a more powerful reaction from a reader. The right message on the right platform at the right time is key to successful digital marketing. Try mapping your messages to the stages of the buyer’s journey and track where your customers are currently at so they get the right message to move them through the marketing funnel.
Insight 6: Social media platforms are influencing local searches
Social media was once an optional marketing platform for businesses that wanted to try investing it in. Now it’s one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. If your business isn’t in the social media game, you are missing out on major opportunities. And as social media continues to gain relevance to businesses, it’s important to contextualize it in the framework of a local search.
Google has confirmed that Instagram and TikTok are the most popular sites for young people who want to find local businesses. They are able to search on these platforms and locate businesses in their area that appeal to their interests. One reason for this is the visually-rich design of a social media platform compared to a traditional search engine like Google. However, there are still many people who use Google as their search tool.
There has been much emphasis over the years on the value of having high-quality images on your Google My Business profile so that searchers understand the value of your brand. However, that same mindset needs to be applied to your social media channels as well in order to attract younger generations. As younger people become a more powerful force in the buying network, having plans in place to target these audiences becomes even more important.
Insight 7: User-Generated Content (UGC) drives local search experiences
User-generated content, or content that is created by your users, typically on social media, is often thought of as only images, videos, and posts. However, there is another major source of UGC: reviews. Reviews of your local business are essential to remaining relevant in the coming years. In fact, some businesses have been extorted for review from scammers who spam a business with bad reviews and refuse to take them down until gift cards or money transfers are given.
While being targeted by scammers might be rare, it’s still an important story to keep in mind about the value of reviews and how important they are to local businesses. You want to do everything within your power to encourage people to leave reviews and to closely monitor those reviews and respond to them. Make it easy for your customers to create user-generated content and help explain how important their feedback is to your business.
Schedule a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
At Surefire Local, we want to help business owners get the most out of their marketing tools and prepare their marketing strategies for the upcoming year. When you work with Surefire Local, you get the benefits of an all-in-one platform that manages nearly every aspect of your marketing plan from a single source of truth.
Surefire Local helps you achieve your marketing goals and stay up to date on incoming trends and valuable insights that can drive more revenue and more successful campaigns. With the help of Surefire Local, you can integrate with other software applications, analyze your data, measure your ROI, optimize your messaging, and improve your local search results with one tool. The capabilities provided by Surefire Local help you prepare for 2023 and beyond.
To learn more, get a demo of our business intelligence marketing software today. We’ll walk you through all the tools we offer to make marketing your business easier and more successful.