As marketers, we have seen a lot of turmoil in the last 18 months—everything from changed consumer behavior to evolved shopping journeys and new privacy regulations. With 2022 around the corner, it’s never been a better time to start investing in social advertising or ramping up your efforts. In fact, most companies (74%) already allocate one-third or more of their marketing budget to social media advertising.
Here’s what you need to know for a thriving 2022.
Shopping journeys will continue to grow complex
All brands aim to meet their customers where they are—an increasingly arduous ambition in today’s landscape where consumers seamlessly move from online to offline and jump between social channels. Topped with the ever-increasing competition of consumer’s attention, what’s a marketer to do?
As consumers spend more and more time on social media, they also have multiple touchpoints with a brand before making a purchase, and every touchpoint matters. In addition, many (if not most) touchpoints happen on social—everything from discovery to purchase.
The year 2022 will be the year of diversification and implementing a true multi-platform social advertising strategy. Remember that different platforms serve different mindsets and intentions and understanding each platform’s role in the funnel is instrumental in creating genuine and long-lasting customer relationships. A multi-platform strategy allows you to meet your customers at every step of their shopping journey, communicate a coherent brand story and ultimately build trust within your audience.
Creative will be more critical than ever in driving successful campaigns
As privacy regulations settle into the advertising ecosystem in 2022, the importance of creative will come to full fruition. Creative has been undervalued as a lever in terms of personalization, and it’s coming back with force. In addition to engagement, strong creative will be brands’ biggest driver of performance, too.
Investing in a creative strategy is instrumental in an advertising world that’s not ruled by algorithmic targeting anymore. Get creative with the privacy-friendly data available, and you’ll find a plethora of ways to offer personalized ad experiences to your audience. For example, we have seen brands use the weather forecast, sports results and even pollen levels to create relevant and compelling ads. Or invest in AI-powered creative insights to leapfrog your performance to a new level. The key to finding the right creative direction and best-performing ads is a robust creative testing plan—knowing what resonates with our audience is the foundation for any successful campaign.
Brands will open the data privacy dialogue
With the new privacy regulations, brands need to change the communication from talking at their audience to talking with their audience. When consumers click “opt-in” or “track cookies,” they typically don’t understand why. The result is a one-sided point of view, leading to a lack of trust in the brand, primarily because of what they hear and with very little or no context. In 2022 and beyond, smart advertisers will change this.
New privacy regulations have sparked the opportunity to have open conversations with consumers about their data. To do so, brands will take newfound ownership over what they’re doing with consumer data, and more importantly, give consumers transparent insights, education and resources to realize what their data is being used for and why.
As a result, we can expect organizations to start hiring more people that know how to converse with consumers in a helpful, easy-to-understand way. These changes will then drive consumers to make more educated decisions around their data—including what a simple click opting in or out will mean for their online experience.
AI will dominate when augmented with human touch
There is a common misconception that AI is at its full potential regarding innovation and effectiveness, including its application in online advertising. And while it’s certainly advanced and perhaps 95% of the way there, the human touch is still required—even if just for that last 5%.
Before planning your strategies for the next year, take a step back and remember the intent of AI in the first place, which is to enable faster and more accurate decision-making. When pairing AI with a human mind that digs deeper into the insights, you can make an educated final decision.
AI has an opportunity to advance digital advertising by eliminating guesswork in creative—constantly learning and optimizing what is resonating with consumers. With this in mind, we can expect to see more AI innovation and adoption in ad tech. To be done effectively and responsibly, though, human augmentation must play a critical role.
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As global head of marketing at Smartly.io, Riikka Söderlund has a front-row seat to how some of the world’s biggest brands transform their advertising. Advising on marketing strategy for global advertising giants and rising disruptor brands, she has helped brands navigate digital transformation and build new working models for in-house teams, agency-brand cooperation and creative production to deliver world-class marketing programs all around the world.
