New year, new trends! While we haven’t quite made it to 2022 yet, you can bet that the new year will bring new marketing trends for your business to try.
Don’t fall behind on the latest trends and miss out on an opportunity to increase your brand awareness and your revenue after the holiday season. Keep up with the latest trends so that your business can continue to grow next year.
Here are the top B2C marketing trends you can expect to see in 2022 and ways your business can start preparing for them now:
Shorter video content
If your call to action isn’t in the first few seconds of your video, chances are your consumers are not going to see it. Right now, research shows that videos under two minutes in length have higher completion rates and get the most traction and engagement online.
As the desire for shorter videos continues to increase, next year, marketers should expect to see that the top performing videos are under 90 seconds.
Now is the time to perfect your Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok strategies so that your brand is able to share content with your target audience that is short and sweet.
Experts predict that video content will make up more than 82% of all consumer traffic by 2022. Don’t miss out on this traffic by making videos that are too long for the average consumer’s attention span.
Social responsibility
In Bo Burnham’s latest comedy special, he jokes that due to the social reckoning that is happening in our culture, “The question is no longer, ‘Do you want to buy Wheat Thins?’…The question is now, “Will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease?”
While he makes this joke to get laughs, his commentary is not far from the truth. Now more than ever, consumers are just as interested in what a brand stands for as they are in the products and services the brand has to offer.
Roughly 70% of consumers want to know what brands are doing to address social and environmental issues. 75% of millennials want the brands they support to give back to society. These numbers are only going to increase in the coming years as a growing number of brands embrace transparency and take a stand against injustice, inequality, and related issues.
Take the time to evaluate the heart of your brand and what you stand for as a company, and be prepared to share these stances with your audience. Whether this is through a social media post, donations from every purchase to a charitable organization, or some other marketing method, in 2022 it will be crucial for your brand to be able to demonstrate social responsibility.
User-generated content
User-generated content has a stronger influence on consumers purchasing decisions than marketer generated content or influencer content.
In 2022, more brands will use user-generated content to sell their products and services.
You can prepare for this trend by coming up with some fun ways to get user-generated content.
For instance, you can host a holiday giveaway where you award a prize to the customer that shares the most creative photo of their family using your products at Thanksgiving using a hashtag you create.
You can try asking customers to send in product reviews and share the most heartwarming stories with your target audience.
You can also offer discount codes to customers who share a photo of themselves wearing or using your products that you can post to your website or on your social media pages.
However you choose to solicit and share user-generated content, you should make sure to make this a part of your marketing strategy next year.
Chatbots
While many B2B brands already incorporate chatbots into their websites, many B2C brands are just implementing this AI on their websites.
In the coming years, you can expect cutting edge brands to use chatbots to help address customer service requests, answer questions and offer a more personalized shopping experience. In fact, by 2022, it is expected that 80% of brands will have integrated chatbots into their digital marketing strategy.
Start looking into chatbot services now so that you can keep up with your competition and provide great service for your customers.
Before you get too far into your B2C marketing strategy for next year, consider how to implement these B2C marketing trends, and you will see your business continue to grow in 2022.