When it comes to digital marketing, it’s not necessarily about reinventing the wheel year after year, or the latest and greatest trend. Instead, it pays to ensure you have your finger on the pulse and are getting your digital marketing fundamentals right year-on-year. Can the fundamentals change? Yes, absolutely. As social media and digital channels evolve, so too must businesses and their marketing.
So what’s in store for 2022? Let’s take a peek.
Email Marketing Wins the Race
Brands are prioritising their email channels more and more, and it comes down to a few essentials. Unlike social media, your email platform allows you to personalise and automate in a much more in depth way. On top of this, as users become more aware of privacy, email allows for more secure data flow.
Melissa Sargeant, CMO at Litmus says, “Litmus recently released a State of Email report showcasing that email has become marketing’s most important channel: 91% of survey respondents maintained email marketing is critical to the overall success of their company. This is up 20 percentage points since 2019, and more than 40% of companies intend to increase their investment in 2022.”
This is more than just monthly newsletters or weekly round-ups, though they still hold their importance to ensure activity and relevancy with your audience. Your email channel should also provide you with the segmentation, automation and information you need to send targeted brand messaging to your audience based on where they’re at in the marketing funnel. The investment in the set up of this is vital, but what you’re left with is a relatively ever-green marketing platform that allows you to continuously work on your business, instead of in it.
Engagement, not Reach
Reach or impressions are a great base point to evaluate whether your ads are appearing in the newsfeed. But that’s basically where it starts and ends. Someone that slowly scrolls past your ad without barely stopping can be counted towards the reach for your campaign. So how can you decipher how many people are actually seeing your ad?
Keep an eye on your engagement rates. A large volume of impressions is great, but your engagement rate – that is the number of times someone interacts with your campaign (like, comment, share, click, etc) – is more important. By focusing on your engagement rate you will have a deeper understanding of how well your content resonates with your audience, and whether or not your messaging is targeted enough towards their needs.
Information-rich Content
There is a lot of content out there to contend with, and it’s continually growing. So what will make yours different, what will make your target audience want to take the time to engage with your content specifically?
It often comes down to information. What are you offering, what are you willing to contribute to them for free? A lot of content these days is surface-level at best, designed merely as a stepping stone to a sign-up or a conversion. That’s fine, and it does work – sometimes. The level of content saturation out there is high, so our third point to consider this year is to evaluate how truly valuable your content is for your prospective clients or customers. Are you delivering information and content that they require or are interested in, or are you delivering a sugar-coated sales pitch?
On top of this, we shouldn’t forget that Google prefers information-rich content. Longer form content creates a variety of options for keyword optimisation, back-linking, and also ensures readers are kept on your page for longer (Google also likes this!). Of course, like anything – there’s a fine line. If it’s too long, you risk disinterest, so as a rule of thumb, we recommend blogs of about 500-600 words. If you have more than that, turn it into a mini series – it’s more opportunities for clicks, backlinks and keyword implementation!
