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Most of us agree that change is the only constant for marketers, and adapting is part of the job.

In 2020, the start of the pandemic transformed the way we work and handle business, from rapidly shrinking budgets to events' going virtual to the newly hybrid workforce.

Expect the difficulties to persist and perhaps even morph into new hurdles in 2022.

CMOs will continue to face higher rates for digital media buying, challenges in recruiting the right talent, and difficulties engaging increasingly digitally savvy buyers. Higher customer expectations will become the new baseline.

As the goal posts continue to move in the digital marketing environment, marketing leaders will need to enhance their skill sets to improve their team's effectiveness without creating burnout. Raising marketing budgets to pre-COVID levels—if not higher—will be crucial. Highly personalized, multichannel tactics will be the norm. Events will become hybrid, which can mean twice the cost (and work). Employer branding efforts will level-up.

Considering all that, CMOs need to stand firm on internal budget negotiations and come prepared with an unbeatable business case. Moreover, a close and ongoing relationship with the CFO will be necessary for marketing leaders to be the most effective.

All that touches on only a few of the changes in store for marketers in the year ahead.

Marketing connects to various departments within an organization, so I reached out to several other leaders to gather their thoughts on 2022 marketing predictions.

Shift to topics, not keywords

With Google's continuous focus and improvements in NLP [natural language processing], optimization for exact keywords will be less of a priority. Sites may notice decreases in rankings for keywords with higher search volumes, but actually notice more overall traffic from related long-tail keywords. So, content should be focused on a particular topic, and the goal should be the satisfaction of the searcher's intent for the different queries for the topic. These improvements in NLP will also influence the way people phrase their search queries, which may also lead to decrease in volumes for previously high-searched terms.

-Ola King, user researcher at Moz

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Isabelle Papoulias

Isabelle Papoulias is the CMO of Mediafly, a sales enablement solution provider. Having started as a sales director, Isabelle quickly transitioned to marketing to build Mediafly's marketing engine from the ground up.

LinkedIn: Isabelle Papoulias