How To Capitalise Social Media Marketing Trends in 2022

Social media marketing is one of the main ways brands can make contact and build beneficial relationships with their target audience.

But as these platforms frequently receive large-scale updates and consumer behaviour continues to evolve, brands must keep close tabs on the latest trends to increase brand awareness and sales.

Yet the incredible speed at which the social media industry moves ensures that planning and executing an on-trend marketing campaign is easier said than done for many organisations.

As the landscape beneath the world’s largest social media giants shifts faster than ever, your business must pay attention to ensure its strategy is a success.

Using social media to your brand’s advantage allows you to significantly enhance your visibility with your target market. However, the way customers expect businesses to communicate can change virtually overnight.

If you don’t abide by these shifts, your business runs the risk of looking seriously outdated compared to your biggest rivals. Alongside customer feedback and analysis of your competitors’ campaigns, these insights will help you stay on top of the social media landscape.

Alternatively, a leading digital marketing agency like First Page Australia can help you remain at the forefront of social media strategies as we lead cutting-edge concepts for clients every day.

The Best Marketing Tactics and Trends for 2022

It takes significant effort to remain in touch with the emerging marketing tactics and trends impacting the social media sector. Below, we’ve put our finger on the pulse to highlight the methods set to increase brand awareness and sales in the next year.

Focus on Trust

As customers become more aware of the pros and cons of online marketing, ensuring your brand enhances trust with its most valued consumers is vital to your ongoing success.

While there might be brands that sell similar products, if customers trust you to deliver a superior service, you have a much higher chance of securing their business.

So how can you establish trust with your audience? There are numerous ways to go about it, but high-quality content that showcases your expertise is essential.

In addition, expressing your brand’s personality on social media and providing an inside perspective on your operation can forge confidence between consumers and your business.

Highlight Your Values

Customers want to know what businesses stand for in the modern age. While you might have a better product than your rivals, the average consumer is increasingly drawn towards companies that proudly highlight their values.

The idea behind this social media trend is to showcase how there’s more to your business than simply making money. Considering 46% of customers only shop with brands with a “wider societal purpose”, your social media content must express your own purpose.

However, this process has to be handled delicately. If your business presents an image of itself that’s easily dismantled, you run the risk of kickstarting a public relations crisis.

Tell a Story

If your brand is looking to increase consumer trust while highlighting its values, the technique of storytelling is the best way to communicate these messages. Using your social media channels, you can express your company’s overall purpose through powerful narratives.

While it might be tempting to feature your latest products and services within these campaigns, this is best avoided because the entire idea behind storytelling is to make an emotional connection with your audience.

Storytelling has become a favourite technique throughout the pandemic for countless brands internationally. For instance, businesses have highlighted their appreciation for healthcare workers and empathised with customers about the challenging nature of the pandemic.

More Microcontent

The incredible rise of TikTok has been perhaps the biggest change to the social media landscape in recent years.

Having reached the incredible milestone of one billion monthly active users in September 2021, the platform’s short-form format has already been co-opted by Instagram Reels and Snapchat Spotlight.

Alongside these social media features, brands are also finding great success by breaking down long-form content into bite-sized pieces. For example, a video script might be easily repurposed for a blog post, a podcast and a series of social media posts.

By getting creative with microcontent, you can quickly expand your brand’s reach and connect with audiences across a broad range of channels.

Explore New Features

The leading social media platforms have increasingly found themselves in an arms race for supremacy.

Although it’s virtually impossible to predict how these channels will adapt to their evolving user bases, there’s already been a string of announcements about new features coming down the pipeline.

Instagram announced in June that it was moving away from its photo-sharing origins. Instead, they would be implementing more rigorous video-watching features and giving users more control over how their feeds are organised.

Elsewhere, Snapchat is investing heavily in Augmented Reality features, while Facebook Subscriptions is helping fans support their favourite creators with Patreon-like donation tools.

Humanise Your Brand

There’s no doubt that many of the most trending social media ideas are pushing businesses towards humanising their brands. But what does this mean?

As customers are more comfortable knowing the people behind the business, putting influential figures front and centre in your marketing can pay massive dividends.

With occasional posts from the CEO or a charismatic brand representative, you can put a smiling face to your marketing material and help foster trust with your audience.

By showcasing a hands-on video with your products or promoting an update to your business, humanising your brand offers a sense of authenticity and transparency that resonates with modern customers.

Track Misinformation

While most of the social media trends highlighted throughout this article are positive ways to use these channels in 2022, you must also remain aware of how social media can be used with hostile intent.

One of the biggest concerns is misinformation. If untrue stories are allowed to catch hold with your target audience, you might be on the receiving end of unfair criticism that causes your operation long-term damage.

Harmful stories are often started by disgruntled customers, rival companies and even random internet trolls. Therefore, you must remain on top of how people discuss your business.

With the right approach, you can address falsehoods before they reach your wider audience and ensure your brand’s reputation on social media and beyond remains exceptional.

Sophisticated Integration

Over the last few years, we’ve seen how the world of social media has become integrated into services across our everyday lives.

This includes rudimentary examples like signing up to a new website using your Facebook credentials to more complex ideas like notifications appearing on our smartwatches.

As new devices hit the market and social media services quickly become adopted, using sharp integration to your benefit will give you an edge over the competition.

As 5G technology and the Information of Things will massively enhance how our devices speak to each other, this space is bound to be highly influential in 2022.

Become More Positive

You won’t be surprised to learn that the last couple of years has been a wild ride for people around the globe. And it’s not over yet as news about the pandemic continues to hit the front page most days.

As everyday people have become increasingly concerned with their mental health, your brand doesn’t need to create any more doubt in the world. Instead, take a positive tone to your brand’s social media messaging, plus have sincere empathy for the challenges experienced by your target audience.

Whether this means promoting a more understanding return policy or sharing educational content about reducing stress, think about how your brand can use compassion in its social media strategy.

Engage in Conversation

If your business is looking to boost its sales figures, it’s undoubtedly tempted to use social media channels to spruik your products and services directly.

However, you might experience better results with a social media marketing campaign that engages consumers in genuine conversation. Instead of simply hard-selling your range, make sure customers know they are appreciated for choosing you.

By sharing content that asks for your audience’s opinions, and engaging them in the comments, the right approach means customers learn that you care about how your business addresses their needs.

Social commerce is one of the fastest-growing areas of digital marketing, with businesses looking to open up revenue streams and extract genuine value from their social media content strategies.

For example, interactive sales channels like Instagram Shopping have been widely adopted by businesses across most industries. By using highly visual content to showcase your products and capture attention, these posts can instantly link customers to a purchase page.

With Facebook and Pinterest offering similar features, social commerce is a booming trend because it reduces the hurdles customers need to overcome before committing to purchase.

Capitalise on NFTs

NFTs, also known as Non-Fungible Tokens, has definitely been one of the biggest trends in 2021. With this blockchain-based technology seeing digital art bought for millions of dollars, your brand might also be able to leverage this growing space to your advantage.

Naturally, those interested in this rapidly evolving digital sector are supremely active on social media. This means a perfectly designed campaign has the power to massively increase brand awareness amongst new customers.

While there are still plenty of kinks to work out when it comes to NFTs, the leading platforms in the space – such as OpenSea and Rarible – make it remarkably easy to mint your own assets and start selling.

Creator Collaborations

Influencer marketing has been a well-established aspect of social media campaigns for years now. But the rise of collaboration marketing provides a slightly different approach that can prove just as powerful.

Countless visual creators on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch have established enormous followers, so establishing a productive relationship with a creator that shares a similar audience can be hugely rewarding.

For example, having a well-known photographer shoot your products and take over your channels to promote their work could be massive for your reputation.

By using these collaborations to enhance your social media content’s vibrancy and personality, you can forge stronger bonds with your target audience.

As social media is only growing more popular and customers have more options to engage with their favourite brands, businesses looking to generate success must adopt highly effective customer service solutions.

If a customer decides to purchase a product through an Instagram Shopping post, it only makes sense for them to reach out via the same platform if they have a question or encounter an issue. This means you must avoid leaving them on read by adopting detailed customer service strategies.

As these social media interactions with your brand are vital for maintaining your reputation and customer loyalty, expect more of your audience to make contact via social media in 2022.

Interactive Paid Advertising

Paid social media ads have proved to be highly beneficial for millions of brands around the world. As you get your products and services delivered straight into the feeds of your most relevant target market, achieving your objectives becomes so much easier.

However, social media advertising is becoming increasingly interactive. As mentioned earlier, Instagram Shopping posts use the platform’s Checkout feature to enable users to make purchases without ever leaving the app.

Yet this social media trend is set to continue with fresh features like Instagram Live Shopping. This allows creators to tag products during a live broadcast, creating a seamless retail experience, where you chat with your audience and promote must-have items simultaneously.

The AR and VR Explosion

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has been talked about for years at this point, with customers remaining sceptical about the usefulness of these interactions. However, it appears the tech has finally reached a point where it can seriously enhance your marketing campaigns.

For example, many creative cosmetic brands now offer services where customers can see how products look with just their selfie camera and the platform’s powerful machine learning algorithms. Meanwhile, furniture giant IKEA provides AR services that allow users to see how objects look inside their homes before buying.

With Snapchat leading the way on AR and VR integration with social media, pay close attention to how this innovative area progresses in the near future.

Chat with the Experts

Have no doubt that social media marketing will remain critical to how you reach and convert your brand’s target audience in the coming years.

By recognising the latest marketing tactics and trends before your competition, you can enhance your visibility and become known as one of your industry’s top innovators.

However, remaining at the front of the pack is a time-consuming prospect. Instead, partner with the talented team at First Page Australia to give your brand a leading edge.

Across thousands of campaigns for our local and international clients, we’ve delivered enormous growth, satisfaction and sales. Get in touch today to speak with our experts.

How To Capitalise Social Media Marketing Trends in 2022