5 Impactful Marketing Tech Trends to Leverage in 2022

The ongoing global pandemic in 2022 has continued to hasten the adoption of cloud and digital technology across all company functions, and marketing is no exception. Naturally, marketers have always been eager early adopters of any new tech trend. From big data analytics to social media and artificial intelligence (AI), it’s frequently been in marketing departments that we’ve first seen them being put to work and producing results.

This won’t change in the upcoming year, either. Marketers will continue to use technology solutions to adjust to our increasingly online and digital way of life. Extended reality and the metaverse, in particular, are becoming increasingly popular, and brands and organizations will adjust to the problems of tracking and responding to changes in customer behavior across an ever-growing number of channels. There will also be specific difficulties, most notably the anticipated termination of cookies in 2022. Marketers will have more tools than ever to deal with this, fueled by increasingly complex AI and analytics.

Here is our summary of the key marketing themes we believe will be prevalent in 2022.

Marketing strategies based on artificial intelligence

Just look at Facebook, Google advertising, or any of the thousands of other sites that utilize clever algorithms to present advertisements to potential customers. AI has been a component of marketing for quite some time. We may anticipate a rise in natural language processing (NLP) tools in 2022. These tools are used to detect where products and services are being discussed on social media and to write marketing copy that will draw in an audience. Chatbots will continue to advance in sophistication and move beyond providing basic customer care guidance to engaging with potential clients in a marketing capacity. Overall, use cases involving making sense of the enormous expansion in the amount of data currently available to businesses will continue to be the most valuable for AI. Customer data will undoubtedly play a significant role in this. Still, companies will increasingly turn to external data sources to gain insights that will help them sell their goods and services. These findings are too complicated to communicate through conventional dashboards and visualizations effectively. Therefore, marketers will increasingly turn to data-driven storytellers and storytelling.

Virtual reality and the metaverse

It’s fair to argue that marketers haven’t decided how to approach the metaverse. We’re still ways off from the grand vision of persistent, interconnected digital realities where every part of our life can be played out online. For some of its core components, such as extended reality, which includes virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR), it’s a different tale. When the metaverse era does arrive, these technologies will undoubtedly be crucial, but they are already being aggressively integrated into marketing plans and campaigns. As individual metaverse ideas like Meta’s Horizon merge in 2022, we will likely see them applied in more integrated ways. Because technology allows us to try out virtual versions of real things, from clothing to home furnishings, in real-world settings, AR, in particular, will continue to play a significant role in many marketing campaigns. Letting shoppers see how things would look in their homes may lower return rates. It also offers more immersive and interactive digital shopping experiences, which increase brand engagement and loyalty. However, with the growing accessibility of cost-effective headset technology, VR could also succeed as a marketing tool in 2022. This opens up the option for firms wishing to showcase their products in more immersive ways to use virtual product showrooms and even shopping malls. In marketing for real estate. It will be utilized more and more to allow prospective buyers to tour and inspect properties that interest them. A chance to interact “hands-on” with items in ways that were not previously conceivable is also provided by new technology, such as haptic feedback devices that let users “feel” in virtual reality.

Micro-moments and hyper-personalization

Thanks to the increasingly sophisticated techniques available for analyzing and predicting customer behavior, brands may now identify micro-moments or selling chances that may only last a few seconds. In 2022, many marketers will prioritize improving their capacity to recognize these events and respond to them with targeted marketing strategies. Today’s customers demand that brands recognize their requirements as distinct individuals and cater to them, giving them what they need when they need it. A company like Expedia or TripAdvisor, for instance, would be able to recognize when a potential client has arrived in a new place and provide them hotel or restaurant recommendations. These moments can be identified at scale using technology, such as AI and machine learning, which can then be utilized to create personalized approaches guiding customers toward particular products or services. As one illustration, exit Bee’s machine learning technology uses behavioral recognition algorithms to spot user disengagement from content and the likelihood that they will be receptive to receiving tailored advertisements.

The “Post Cookies Era”

The era of cookies, which allowed websites to follow our online behavior by placing code on our computers, is ending as people become more concerned with their privacy online. By 2022, Chrome will stop supporting “third party” cookies, joining other well-known browsers like Firefox and Opera. In the upcoming year, marketers’ primary focus will likely be on finding new ways to track and understand user behavior. Hubspot reports that 44% of marketers believe this move will necessitate a considerable increase in spending to maintain the same level of performance in 2022 as they did in 2021. There is a good chance that many ad-supported websites that generate revenue by providing their users with relevant ads may have to reconsider their business strategy. A change in emphasis toward first-party data collection rather than depending on third-party data provided by cookies is probably a key component. Above all, the removal of the ability for marketers to use third-party cookies to track user activity serves as a crucial reminder for them not to become overly dependent on any digital technology or tool. While Silicon Valley and its tech behemoths govern the digital sphere, infrastructure components we’ve long taken for granted could be removed anytime!

Hybrid Events

With the popularity of hybrid events, attendees can choose between in-person and virtually. As businesses discover the advantages of enabling attendance from anywhere worldwide to go beyond simply responding to the pandemic, this trend is expected to continue throughout the year and perhaps long beyond. This will be a crucial trend for marketers because events generally consume 20% of marketing expenses. Hybrid events can take many different shapes, but at their most fundamental level, they entail remotely recreating or providing access to event content like speeches, keynote addresses, performances, or networking opportunities. At their most complex, it can entail using technology like VR or AR to let a small audience explore and interact with an event as if they were in person or to allow participants to interact with digital or virtual aspects while they are present.

Trends come and go, but social media will stay for a long time.

Read more on Why businesses need an established social media presence in 2022