“Our goals can only be reached through the vehicle of a plan. There’s no other route to success.”
- Pablo Picasso



Despite having a top-notch product or service, a brilliant team, and a rock-solid foundation, countless businesses are constantly struggling to put their products or services in front of their audience.
Data fetched from a report indicates that over 50% of businesses shut down in the first five years. And if you dig a bit more, you’ll find out that nearly 50% of businesses don’t have a marketing strategy at all. 

And while a whopping 82% of failed businesses have reported poor cash flow to be the BIG reason behind their failure, one of the other major factors that result in chaos is a lack of focus on building a fool-proof marketing strategy.

You may be investing thousands of dollars in social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, paid ads, yet may still fail to achieve the desired results. That’s because running these campaigns just because every business out there is doing it isn’t the way to go. 

What most businesses don’t realize is that digital marketing is a strategic process. From attracting traffic to your website to converting them into paying customers, you need to build a highly-converting marketing funnel – which will help you achieve the best possible results.

But before you start putting all the pieces together, you need to build a fool-proof digital marketing strategy that’ll help you head in the right direction.

This blog post clearly explains why it’s important for business owners to build a results-driven digital marketing strategy in 2022.

Let’s dive straight into them.

5 BIG Reasons Businesses Should Develop a Results-Driven
Digital Marketing Strategy in 2022

Following are the five reasons we’ll be discussing throughout the blog post:

• Gain Insights into Who Your Target Audience is
• Head in the Right Direction
• Generate Higher Revenue
• Figure Out Your Unique Selling Proposition
• Save Top Dollars

Gain Insights into Who Your Target Audience is

Unless you can sell to everyone, you need to figure out who your target audience is. Let’s say you run an online leather bags store delivering high-quality leather bags to people based in the United States. Now, if you are spending thousands of dollars on paid ads, you’d want to make sure that your ads are being displayed in front of people with the following characteristics:

• Location – United States
• Interest – Leather Bags

In this case, location and interest are a must. Some other factors may include age, income, purchase history, and more. 

But what if you don’t know who your target audience is? In that case, your ads may end up being displayed in front of almost everyone, even the ones who are highly unlikely to purchase your products. 

So – let’s say people based in the United Kingdom end up clicking on your ad, only for them to later find out that you don’t deliver in the United Kingdom. Not only will you be creating a bad impression, but you will also be wasting your advertising dollars on people who are either unlikely to purchase your product or who you can’t sell to. 

That’s the reason it’s important to figure out who your target audience is. Identifying your brand’s target audience is one of the most critical aspects of building a digital marketing strategy. While building your strategy, either you may choose to keep it general like gender, age, location, or you may also build different customer avatars to maximize your returns. 

And based on these avatars, you can hyper-personalize your campaigns and generate the big bucks. 

Head in the Right Direction

One of the big reasons why 50% of businesses fail in the first five years is that they’re clueless and headed in the wrong direction. As a business owner, you may want to generate hundreds of high-quality leads each day and convert a maximum number of them into paying customers. 

We understand!

But unless you have a rock-solid marketing funnel in place, that is simply impossible to achieve. Marketing isn’t a linear process. It’s a strategic combination of multiple tactics and channels working together to help you achieve your goals. 

While building your marketing strategy, you will conduct market research, identify who your target audience is, conduct competitive analysis, learn which digital channels your audience is hanging out on, and more. So – until recently, if you were reaching out to the wrong people or promoting your products or services across the wrong channels, building a fool-proof marketing strategy will help you realize your mistakes. 

Once you familiarize yourself with your mistakes, you can optimize your marketing campaigns or build conversion-focused ones from the ground up, helping you head in the right direction.

Generate Higher Revenue

As stated by the tech giant “Google” itself, companies equipping themselves with digital strategies can expect 2.8x better revenue growth expectancy than the organizations that don’t. 

By building a digital marketing strategy, you’ll be implementing different digital marketing tactics across different channels strategically – which will help you convert as many of your target audience into paying customers.

A results-driven digital marketing strategy will help you build a highly converting marketing funnel – from top to bottom. From fueling your top of the funnel with prospects and existing customers to nourishing them at different stages of their journey to finally converting them into paying customers to retention, a digital marketing strategy will help you build a conversion-focused marketing funnel that’ll help you generate more leads and higher revenue.   

Figure Out Your Unique Selling Proposition

If you run a pest control store in Georgia, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses similar to yours. If you run a SaaS company, there are thousands, if not millions, of companies are offering a similar platform or tool.

Upon heading over to your website or interacting with your business for the very first time, chances are that your audience may find themselves asking the question:

“Why should I buy from this brand if there are many other popular brands offering the same products or services just like theirs?”

In today’s ever-competitive world, you need to position yourself as unique. That’s one of the ways you’ll be able to thrive. 

Maybe, you are offering top-notch products or services cheaper than your competitors. Or maybe you’re providing a stellar customer experience. Whatever your unique selling proposition is, you need to put it in front of your audience.

Following are the questions you may ask yourself to identify your company’s USP:

• Who are my customers?
• Who are my competitors?
• What is it we’re truly selling?
• Why should people buy from us?
• What problems do our products/services solve?
• What are we offering that our competitors aren’t?
• Can we communicate this strength effectively?

Save Top Dollars

You may be spending your money on the wrong tools. Maybe, you are just wasting your marketing budget by promoting your products or services across the wrong channels. Worse – you don’t know who your target audience is. 

While digital marketing and advertising involve a lot of testing and optimizing, if you don’t have a marketing strategy in place, that’s out of the picture. Not having a strategy will stop you from figuring out what you’re doing wrong and which campaigns are delivering the best results.

As we mentioned in #2, you’ll just be heading in the wrong direction. By building a digital marketing strategy, you’ll know which people to focus on, tools to invest in, channels to focus on, and more. In short, you’ll know what’s worth spending money on and what’s not. This will help you save your precious marketing dollars and run strategic digital marketing campaigns while staying under budget.

Conclusion

According to DataReportal, people are spending 6 hours 58 minutes, on average, using the internet. This ever-increasing reliance on the internet has made it critical for business owners to build strategic digital marketing and advertising campaigns.

A results-driven digital marketing strategy will help you head in the right direction and drive results. 

And if you haven’t yet developed your 2022 digital marketing strategy, we’d advise you to do it today.

If you are on the lookout for world-class experts to stake your claim in the digital realm, allow us to help you out. 

Contact us today! 

And while the phase-out process will kickstart starting mid-2023, advertisers and businesses across the globe majorly relying on third-party data have been forced to switch to alternate strategies.

This means – the use of third-party data, a strategy that was once one of the hottest digital marketing trends, is now something marketers, advertisers, and businesses are running away from. In short, we can conclude that the world of digital marketing is ever-changing.

And in this ever-changing competitive world, if you want your business to thrive and achieve success, it’s extremely important for you and your marketing department to keep themselves updated with the latest digital marketing trends.

That’s the reason we’re rolling out this blog post in today – as it’ll help you adopt the five hot digital marketing trends and incorporate them into your future marketing strategy for the best possible results.

5 Hot Digital Marketing Trends to Look Forward to in 2022

Following are the five trends we’ll be discussing throughout the blog post:

·     The Dominance of Marketing Automation

·     The Rise of Voice Search

·     Focus on Enhanced Privacy

·     The Start of Metaverse

·     The Continuous Growth of Influencer Marketing

Let’s touch down on each of these trends one at a time.

1. The Dominance of Marketing Automation

The global marketing automation market has been predicted to cross the $6 billion mark by 2026. As of this writing, if the numbers are to be believed, over 51% of companies use marketing automation. Of the ones taping into its full force, nearly 63% of them have reported that they have successfully outperformed their competitors.

That’s exciting. You don’t need to hire additional staff or spend your extra hours on sending a “Welcome Email” to every new customer that signs up on your website or opts for your free trial.

Marketing automation is a world full of endless possibilities. Imagine being able to send different emails to different sets of prospects/customers at different stages of their buyers’ journeys.

Tracking them individually and rolling out emails manually will consume a huge chunk of you and your staff members’ time. But – with marketing automation, you can set triggers and use different platforms and software to fulfill the purpose. [Need help managing these automations? Get in touch.]

We’re witnessing an ever-increasing number of businesses benefiting from marketing automation. Some of the most common examples (use-cases) include:

·     Sending Welcome Emails

·     Publishing on Social Media Platforms

·     Rolling Out Strategic Newsletters or Emails

·     Customer Onboarding

·     Sending Transactional Message & Updates

·     Reminding Cart Abandoners

·     And much more!

2. The Rise of Voice Search

These days, it’s common for people to say, “What’s the weather like today?” to their smart speakers. By the end of this year, about 55% of households will reportedly own a smart speaker. The global smart speaker market value has been predicted to reach $15.6 billion by 2025, up from $7.1 billion in 2020.

You’ll be shocked to know that some people treat their smart assistants as their own family members.

Own an iPhone and want to wake up at 6 A.M.?

“Siri – can you please wake me up at 6 A.M. tomorrow?”

That’s all you need to say.

Over 65% of smart speaker users have reported that they can’t imagine going back to the time when there were no smart speakers around. And with an ever-increasing number of people and wide usage of smart speakers, it makes sense for businesses to optimize their content for voice search.

That’s because the way we communicate with our smart speakers is different from how we type on Google. For example, if you are on the lookout for a good Chinese restaurant in New York, then here’s the difference.

Google Query – “best chinese restaurants in New York”

Voice Search – “Hey {Smart Assistant Name}, could you please show me the five best Chinese restaurants in New York?”

There’s a huge difference. Hence, it’s important for business owners to ensure that their website, as well as content, are voice search-friendly.

3. Focus on Enhanced Privacy

We talked about this in the introduction section. But – Google’s third-party cookie phase-out initiative isn’t the only privacy-driven measure being discussed in the marketing world. In 2021, Apple launched its privacy-focused features like App Tracking Transparency, Mail Privacy Protection, and more to protect user data.

About 86% of Americans have reported that they are extremely concerned about their online privacy and have tried eradicating or decreasing their online footprint at least once.

And despite regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and more, we’ve been witnessing tech giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, and many more tracking our day-to-day activities and using our data without consent.

These enhanced privacy measures have been making it harder for marketers, advertisers, and businesses to hyper-personalize their campaigns or track their consumer activity – which has resulted in many of their marketing and advertising campaigns failing.

But – it’s not the end. Marketers have always prevailed and learned to adapt in these types of situations. Just like how we adapted to take on the power social media marketing. So rest assured, we’ll figure something out.

4. The Start of Metaverse

Recently, we witnessed the milestone of Facebook changing its company name to Meta. If you haven’t heard already, be sure to watch Mark Zuckerberg introduce the concept of Metaverse in this ~10-minute-long video.

What is the Metaverse? Honestly, nobody really knows for sure. All we know is that it’s a virtual reality space where people can build their own avatars and interact with others in the virtual world – engage in fun activities, communicate, participate in contests and do much more.

With Metaverse being a fairly new yet revolutionary concept, metaverses like Decentraland and many more are flooded with Millennials & Gen-Z.

Brands don’t want to miss out – which is why we’ll see them market and advertise their products and services in these virtual worlds. Roblox, in 2021, announced the launch of Vans World – which is a highly interactive Vans metaverse playground.

For those who are not aware, Vans is one of the most popular shoe brands across the globe. This online park has been visited by more than 48 million people – which in itself is really impressive.

Brands have already begun their marketing and advertising efforts across different metaverses. And in 2022 and beyond, we’ll see this trend continue.

5. The Continuous Growth of Influencer Marketing

Data fetched from Statista indicates that influencer marketing's global market value stood at $13.8 billion in 2021. And if you think we are at the peak, we’re just getting started. Influencer marketing has been predicted to cross new heights – with an ever-increasing number of businesses investing thousands or millions of dollars each in reaching out to and collaborating with influencers to promote their products and services.

For every single dollar, you spend on influencer marketing, you may expect an average ROI of $6.5. That’s huge.

And while influencer marketing has become quite common, we’re seeing brands switching to nano and micro-influencers to run strategic campaigns at a budget-friendly price.

If you haven’t yet begun tapping into the power of influencer marketing, you’re missing out a huge opportunity to grow your business.

Conclusion

As we mentioned above, the world of digital marketing is constantly changing. And it’s crucial for businesses like yours to stay up to date with the latest trends. Make sure that you are implementing new strategies into your campaigns and ask yourself, is your business prepared for the future?