Whether you rely mostly on social media to connect with your customers or use a blog to keep your audience informed, you’re always adjusting, adapting, and researching new marketing trends. And now that 2021 is nearly over, smart marketers like you may already be checking out the next trends for 2022.

Let us inspire you with the top marketing trends that will take your campaigns to a whole new level next year. These trends will help you better understand your industry and provide insights into where your marketing campaigns are headed.

Six Top 2022 Marketing Trends

The following are the top six marketing trends to watch out for in 2022.

More Value from Social Media Marketing

All businesses know the value of using social media to connect with their customers and followers. Almost all companies use social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube where they also contact different companies, clients, and influencers.

Using social media for marketing will continue next year as more and more brands realize the value of creating a strong online presence. Marketers also take advantage of the many features of social media platforms like how Facebook uses demographics to target sales.

Many businesses will likely continue using social media sites to connect with customers and use these to provide good customer service. Social media sites can also help announce offers, deals, and any updates. Businesses with no social media pages or that are not taking advantage of social media to connect with their customers should start this year. 

Take Advantage of Extended Reality (XR)

XR is going to be big next year, as many brands are realizing the value of this technology to help engage with their audience. Extended Reality is the combination of virtual reality or VR, augmented reality or AR, and mixed reality or MR.  XR enhances and may replace how customers view the world, using immersive text and graphics in a virtual environment that simulates the real world.

XR in marketing means consumers can qualitatively explore ads and check out even the smallest details before they decide on a product or a service. The technology is interactive and versatile and some businesses are already using XR and reaping its benefits. Some examples are the try-before-you-buy options in businesses, where consumers can check if a product like a piece of furniture fits well in their home. Consumers may use XR to view travel destinations or accommodations before they book their stay. Meanwhile, XR tours of real estate properties can change the way realtors and salespeople serve their customers.

Gain Insights from Machine Learning and AI

A lot of brands are now realizing the value of artificial intelligence and machine learning in marketing. These technologies can help marketers develop deeper insights to create new campaigns, new risk prediction strategies, and start new direct-response marketing efforts. Digital Authority Partners adds that AI also makes data-driven marketing less labor-intensive.

Artificial Intelligence provides a personalized experience for different users. AI can create a worthwhile customer journey, affect buying decisions, and create loyalty. Business Insider reveals that with proper human guidance, AI will reach its full potential. Those who understand how to use this technology can develop new paradigms and ideas which enhance their competitive edge in their respective markets. 

Virtual Marketing and Teleconferencing

Many businesses had to adapt to lockdowns and shut-downs caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many also had to switch from running their businesses in a brick and mortar environment to a virtual storefront. In 2021, restrictions gradually eased in many places but many companies still operate virtually, and thus, it’s possible that virtual marketing and techniques like teleconferencing will remain next year.

Digital marketers and advertisers will continue to work from home with scheduled virtual meetings and teleconferences. Agencies may embrace this setup fully as this cuts down overhead or operational costs. Also, marketing teams can choose from different virtual technology, productivity, and communication tools to make virtual marketing easier and seamless.

Digital Marketing Best Practices

With just a simple blog site, a business can increase its online presence and secure more leads by 67%. What more leads or sales might they generate if they made use of social media platforms and websites?

Marketers and advertisers have learned to grow their business’ online presence and this practice will continue to influence the industry for many years to come. Nowadays, there are more tools and online technologies available for marketers such as site-building tools, stock image websites, and graphics creation sites.

Even someone new to digital marketing can easily dive right in by using smart and easy apps and tools. Marketers working on a tight budget can also use free-version tools to help them meet their marketing goals. Those who are not using digital marketing tools should consider this powerful option next year. A good stack of tools includes a social marketing tool, email marketing tool, and SEO tools. More optimized digital marketing strategies call for tools like conversion optimization tools, lead enrichment tools, graphics creation tools, and landing page or lead capture tools.

Focus On Analytics and Customer Habits

Successful marketers study data and use it to create better marketing campaigns. Marketers must focus on site metrics to determine what works and what’s not integrated with their strategies. Site metrics will tell marketers whether their targeted content is working or their personalized ads are reaching specific groups. Knowing all these can guarantee a higher return on marketing investments in the long run.

As most marketers know, customer habits affect the way consumers choose and buy products or services. Also, consumers have changed over the years and are now more selective when it comes to branded media they support and those that they set aside. Because of these new trends, brands must use analytics to create targeted ads to capture their buyers’ attention. Learning how to analyze data will allow marketers to offer the right ads at the best time and on the most appropriate channel.

Wrapping It Up

It’s another year, another chance to wow consumers with winning marketing campaigns. Successful digital marketers understand present-day and upcoming trends. The world is fast-changing and customers adapt new and better buying habits year after year. It’s a must for marketers to stay ahead of these trends and be quick to know what their customers are looking for. 

Safety nets are meant to catch you when you stumble. They don’t stop you from falling, but they can help make your recovery faster and smoother than it should be.

So, what financial safety net do you need to have? The answer is an emergency fund.

What Is an Emergency Fund?

An emergency fund is a collection of savings that you set aside for the sole purpose of paying for emergency expenses. These expenses must be urgent and unpredictable, and they can’t be resolved with the help of your regular budget. When you encounter this type of expense, you can withdraw the necessary funds from your emergency savings to recover from the situation as quickly as possible.

As an example, imagine that the water pipes in your home freeze. This is unpredictable and urgent — you don’t want to spend days without running water. So, you call a plumber to safely thaw your pipes and fix the problem. Once your plumber is done, you can pay their fees right away using some of the savings sitting in your emergency fund.

Why Do You Need an Emergency Fund?

The main benefit of an emergency fund is that you can respond to an emergency expense right away. You can react and work to resolve the issue immediately.

Another benefit is that you can manage an emergency expense without disrupting your budget. Withdrawing from the fund should have no impact on your ability to cover essential expenses for the rest of the month, like your bills and your groceries. Everything continues as normal.

And finally, emergency funds offer peace of mind. You don’t have to panic when an emergency expense crops up — you’re ready to pay for it. Having the safety net in your back pocket should eliminate unnecessary financial stress in your daily life.

What Can You Do Without One?

You might not have an emergency fund at the moment. So, what can you do to handle an emergency expense?

You could get a direct deposit loan and use borrowed funds to recover from the emergency. Click here to see the application requirements for an online direct deposit loan to see whether you’re eligible to apply. If you are, you can fill out an application and wait for the response. You just might get approved for the loan when you need it most.

Another option is to put the expense on your credit card and then steadily pay down your balance later on. It’s essential that you do this when your balance is nowhere near the limit — you don’t want to accidentally max out your credit card. Furthermore, there are many users who ask is it illegal to use a business credit card for personal use.

How Do You Build One?

Starting an emergency fund is simple. First, you have to take a close look at your monthly budget to see how much you can reasonably set aside each month for emergencies. Open a savings account — this will be your new fund. Add the amount that you set aside for emergencies into that new account every month.

To simplify things, you can automate your payments between your checking and savings accounts. Automating allows you to continue making contributions without even thinking about them.

As time goes on, your emergency fund will grow and eventually become a strong safety net. You’ll know that it can catch you any time something goes wrong.

As the age-old proverb goes,’ Old is gold,’ it is advisable not to throw away the old stuff that you have, and rather acknowledge the value and importance of them by various modes of repurposing and reusage.

Let’s take care of the vintage kinds of stuff of your grandparents, parents, and even what we had in our childhood. Old stuff never becomes a waste, but with increasing time, it becomes even more precious in their value. It’s time to preserve them in a way that they become bold and stylish home décor.

No matter what your base home design is, from antic, rustic to contemporary, or eclectic, this article will let you know about some ideas to repurpose your old items and convert them into décor suited to all sorts of designs.

Lamp Holders

Do not throw away those old vintage wine bottles. Rather, use them as lamp fixtures and holders. You can use the caps as small bulbs holders or the upper half as hanging fixtures. With the rustic greenish, brown look, these reinvented lamp holders will give your corners a 70’s grunge feel.

You can also suspend many bottles with a light fixed inside them on a string and place them over the dining table. It will bring in the bold perfect intimate warm affection that you look for in every friend and family gathering.

Wooden Crates

For all those old wooden crates that lay behind in the attic or garage, it is the perfect time to recycle them. Get all the wooden crates and mount them against the walls for DIY floating shelves. You can display your books on the shelves or anything you want to keep. This idea is not only aesthetically beautiful and captivating but also quite economical. You can save a ton from not buying glass shelves and cupboards and by just refurbishing those old crates.

Not only shelves, but you can also make TV stand, and bed-side makeshift tables with these rustic and unique crates.

Window Panes

Another unique yet beautiful home décor idea is to reframe old window panes and restore them as decorating pieces. They will be a unique and distinctive feature of your homes, ready to adorn the walls.

You can also place them as room dividers. Save up some space by not placing doors between rooms and just putting an old window frame there. This can be easily done in the case of the dining-living room or even kitchen-dining space.

Rugs

Out of money just when you were thinking of covering up the floors? Or don’t want to spend much time behind them? Don’t worry as you can easily convert some double bed mattresses into rugs. The only thing you need to do is to stitch them in an eye-catching and fluffy cover. That’s it! Your attractive yet money-saving rug will be made in no time!

The most important thing while redesigning is to be creative. Let your imaginations run wild and make use of the tiniest thing available to you. Be innovative in your ideas and bring them into shape. You can remodel an old sewing machine into a small stock that will hold your cutlery and tissues or an old ladder as a clothes hanger. Just be careful not to throw away anything, and get your remodeled, bold home just within a short span.

Measuring the impact of a marketing campaign helps a business determine whether there is a corresponding growth in profits due to a marketing initiative. The lessons that a company learns by accurately assessing the return on investment (ROI) of its marketing campaigns help stream future marketing campaigns for better returns.

The funds you invest in marketing activities may be revenues generated by the business or from small business financing offered by lending companies. Regardless of the source, you need to ensure that the funds are invested wisely for optimum results.

This article will show you how your business can get the expected ROI from the marketing initiatives. Let’s explore this further.

What Is The Return On Investment (ROI), And Why Is It Important?

Return on investment (ROI) is a significant business performance indicator that compares the investment in a business venture with the returns generated from that expense. It measures how successful an asset is over time and helps make smarter decisions in the future based on data.

Marketing ROI, specifically, is attributing growth in profit and business revenues to marketing campaigns in a business. It helps your company evaluate the impact of its market initiatives in general or the impact of specific marketing campaigns.

Marketing ROI is essential for several reasons:

1- To justify a marketing budget

To justify a budgetary allocation by top management, marketers need a marketing ROI to demonstrate how spending in marketing and advertising will impact the company’s bottom line. You need to justify your marketing spend, particularly if you’ve accessed small business financing for your company.

2- Calculating the success of a marketing campaign

Marketing ROI assists marketing teams in quantifying the impact of marketing campaigns and documents which efforts are most effective in driving revenues. This becomes a reference point for future decisions so that budgets are allocated to online and offline channels with optimal returns.

With this data, you can adjust your budget to allocate more funds to marketing channels that have high returns.

3-. Determine allocation of marketing budgets

There are various online and traditional marketing options that you can explore as a business. You may also combine these options in a marketing mix. A marketing ROI helps dictate how to distribute the marketing budget across the various channels depending on which channels bring in the most revenues.

4-. Comparison with competitors

Monitoring your marketing ROI enables you to make comparisons with other similar businesses within the industry. Using that information, you can establish how effective your marketing initiatives are relative to competitors in the industry and fine-tune your marketing budgets to adopt best practices.

How To Get The Expected ROI For A Marketing Investment

Now that you’re familiar with what marketing ROI is and why it’s essential, we’ll look at what you need to do to get your expected ROI.

-Have well-defined goals

Having clear objectives makes it possible for a business to craft marketing campaigns and advertisements that deliver on expectations. Rather than focus on marketing ROI alone, you can also focus on broader marketing objectives such as brand awareness and online media engagements such as unusual traffic boosts on social media or your landing page.

Have clear goals and how these objectives can be taken into consideration when measuring the marketing ROI.

-Establish marketing costs

Any marketing investment has various costs associated with it. The costs range from the creative development of content where a business may outsource content creation to freelance writers to the overheads involved in coming up with advertisements, promotional expenses, media buys, and so forth.

Clear marketing costs help marketers develop well-thought-out methods of measuring marketing ROI and what they need to consider in their ROI calculations.

-Tracking marketing data across various channels

In today’s omnichannel market scenario, a consumer’s buying journey might take them through various platforms before they finally make a buying decision. A consumer may encounter a link on a blog post that leads them to subscribe to your mailing list. The consumer may buy by getting to a landing page from a marketing email.

Having effective measuring tools empowers the business owner to attribute consumers’ buying decisions to various channels. Marketing analytics and online page analytics help determine the effectiveness of online and offline platforms, giving more accurate insights for marketers to measure marketing ROI more effectively.

How To Measure The ROI (A Basic List-Guide)

Many businesses find calculating their marketing ROI a complex exercise, and it can be. That’s because determining a marketing ROI takes into consideration several factors. First, your calculations need to boil down to a specific period in which you measure your marketing expenditure and the revenue realized.

Secondly, you’ll decide what metrics you’ll use in calculating ROI. Will it be gross profit, net profit, customer lifetime value, or the average sale value? You’ll decide based on what parameters mean the most to your business.

The simplest way to calculate marketing ROI is by comparing sales to your marketing costs.

This is the equation you’ll use:

• (Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI

To get the percentage marketing ROI, you multiply the result by 100.

For instance, if you’ve invested $10,000 in marketing and you’ve generated revenue of $30,000, then:

(30,000-10,000) / 10,000 = 3

Nonetheless, this formula is too simple and may not yield the most accurate marketing  as it overlooks certain critical factors. For instance, it assumes that all sales growth within the period is attributed to the marketing campaign.

Here’s a more accurate marketing ROI calculation that subtracts organic sales growth from the sales growth realized.

• (Sales Growth – Organic Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = Marketing ROI

Even with this formula, it’s still crucial to define what the “marketing cost” is. It can be the simple cost of goods used to derive the Gross Profit of a sale. However, you may decide to go deeper and calculate the ROI by factoring in additional costs used when calculating the Net Profit. Such costs include overheads, media buys, and so forth.

You can also calculate marketing ROI by using customer lifetime value (CLV) using this formula:

• Customer Lifetime Value = (Customer Retention Rate ) / (1 + Discount Rate / Customer Retention Rate)

This helps determine the value of an individual consumer to a brand and is helpful in measuring long-term ROI through a buyer’s lifecycle.

Conclusion

Accurately calculating your ROI for marketing investment is critical to ensure the correct marketing spend for maximum returns and guides future marketing campaigns. You can confidently approach lending institutions for small business financing for marketing when you’re clear on the anticipated returns.