As we all reflect on ’21 it’s our turn to make a few predictions in ’22  

Pay-per-click Advertising 

• Google’s Performance Max campaign type will make headway into many ecommerce PPC strategies, but may struggle with B2B success. This new automated campaign type aims to reach the entire Google Network across all placements, with hybrid creative covering text, image and video. It might be successful in cases where Google has a clear and simple objective to optimize against, but B2B firms and other businesses with complex and long sales cycles may have trouble getting the machine learning to optimize effectively.
  
  
• Google Display Network and campaign types will change dramatically as Google looks to sell more cheap inventory in automated and less transparent campaign types. Many clients struggled in 2021 to get good performance and good placements from Google Display Network. Despite efforts and promises from the Google Ads teams, ultimately so much of GDN is stuck in very weak mobile impressions and fraud. Google is increasingly trying to bundle GDN into other types of media, obscuring the low placement quality, and hoping machine learning will rescue performance.
  
  
• FB/IG Ads platform will continue to improve on the post-iOS14 issues it suffered and FB Ads will continue to be the leader in paid social despite privacy and other platform challenges. Facebook Ads took a big hit in 2021 and many were unsure of the platform’s future. However despite challenges and uncertainly, the industry continued spending and for many clients, the ads kept working. Facebook probably will not get caught so unprepared again, and the ads platform and features will survive and thrive even without cookies.
  
  
• TikTok will grow but will still struggle to make major inroads for most performance advertisers. Many businesses experimented with TikTok ads and organic marketing in 2021 and the push will continue in 2022. Brands marketing to a younger demographic will see TikTok as a critical platform. However most performance marketers will struggle to get the direct response performance they need from TikTok to invest heavily in 2022.
  

Search Engine Optimization 

• MUM will be on our radar?in 2022. MUM is a piece of Google’s efforts to incorporate AI to help make searches more efficient to help Google get you the answer to your query with fewer iterations of your search. From Google’s blog: “MUM has the potential to transform how Google helps you with complex tasks.” Read here for more on How Google MUM Can Affect SEO.

• Core Web Vitals becomes more important. Still in its infancy and not yet a major ranking factor on its own, Google will be tweaking and evolving its ability to measure load speeds and user experience on all devices. 

• This is a stretch still but we will be hearing more and more about?the Metaverse and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). This is more long term, but the metaverse (or Web3) has captured a lot of attention. Some say it could be as big as the beginning of the internet was, and might provide a ton of opportunity for brands and small businesses. Too early to know how SEO could be used to take advantage of this new world if it does take off. Here’s a guide to NFTs and the Metaverse from SearchEngine Journal. 

• Content, content, content. Interactive or rich content – videos, images, audio, widgets, calculators. Content that answers users’ questions thoroughly and authoritatively. 

• Voice Search. Google is improving it’s understanding of voice queries from mobile devices, and not just for restaurant locations or weather info. Keywords about diets, yoga routines, political questions, etc are becoming popular. 

• Personalized results – This is a tough one for SEO. Search results are increasingly personalized. Sites will have to understand how best to target content for intent rather than keywords. 

Email Marketing  

• 90% of customers check out reviews before buying and social proof is a powerful instrument that influences users’ decision-making process. Adding user generated content (reviews, photos, Instagram posts, etc.) will play a big part in emails. 

• “Hyper” personalization (content specifically related to the receiver) should be very important for your email marketing strategy. Addressing the person by name or offering a specific discount will not be enough. Breaking down and segmenting your subscribers based on purchase, products, interest, habits, location and behavior will be important in getting click throughs and purchases. 

• Email marketers will start looking towards click data rather than open data. Apple iOS 15 includes new privacy features that will make it quite challenging to analyze subscriber behavior and significantly skew email open data which will push Email Marketers to focus on segmentation that is more drilled down. 

• Adding interactive elements to your emails will prove to be very effective in 2022. Including survey, polls, animated CTA’s, clickable image carousels, video etc., should improvement engagement and should be part of your email strategy. 
   
• 2021 was the year mobile finally beat desktop! Mcom sales were 49% of total ecommerce sales in 2020 and jumped to 54% in 2021. Emails now need to be designed, not just optimized, for mobile. 

Social Media 

• Reaching new audiences will be a high priority of most marketers in 2022, to grow relationships with customers, and boost customer service.   
  
  
• Social audio to grow in popularity – According to Hootsuite’s 2022 Social Media Trends survey, 74% of businesses are planning to invest in audio-only content in 2022.
  
  
• Social Media for customer service top priority – According to Gartner, 60% of all customer service requests will be sorted out by means of digital channels by 2023. 
   
  
• TikTok to dominate the social media space – With the rapid rise of short-form video, Tik Tok is set to become the main platform to reach millennials and Gen Z in 2022.   
  
  
• Social commerce continues growing – eMarketer anticipates that the social commerce industry will be worth $80 billion by 2025.