Marketing trends for 2022!

With the development of big data, artificial intelligence, and mobile Internet, the marketing market has changed. For example, the development of AI has, on the one hand, produced digital and technological content, bringing users the ultimate interactive and visual experience, which is refreshing; on the other hand, the combination of virtualization and the real world has created an ideal balance space for the public, and the immersive user experience has attracted more people to participate in brand marketing.

At the same time, as users continue to change, their consumption habits and lifestyles influence the direction of marketing. In the consumer market, as users have stronger self-awareness, self-pleasing consumption has gradually become a common state of user consumption. At the same time, user lifestyles affect marketing methods and accelerate changes in the marketing market.

After sorting out the popular cases and events in 2021, the popularity of Mixue Bingcheng Tianmi and Lingna Belle, the screen-sweeping of Jiang Xiaobai's 10th anniversary copy, the one-hour advertisement launched by Xiaoguan Tea during the Mid-Autumn Festival, Liu Yexi's sudden appearance, Hongxing Erke's return to the user's vision due to the wild consumption of users, and Zhang Tongxue, who gained more than 10 million fans in a month and set off the entire network for focusing on "rural life", as well as from the Summer Olympics to the Winter Olympics, etc., let us see the marketing trends in 2022. Mr. Bingfa summarized 5 key words and hope it will be helpful to you.

01 Content+ is king

Content is king is a commonplace topic. For a long time, high-quality content has played an infinite charm. In addition to outputting high-quality content that caters to the spirit of the times, mainstream media also convey brand value/help brands gain economic benefits.

Against the backdrop of the iterative thinking that content is king, content has gradually become "content +". For example, content + Ai led to Liu Yexi's popularity, and content + platform made the emerging scalp care brand Spes an instant hit as soon as it debuted on Douyin. Another example is content + original creative background, which led to Zhang's gain of more than 10 million followers in a month.

It can be seen that content that has insight into the complexity of human nature, gives powerful imagination to the content, can quickly awaken people's emotional resonance, and integrates attributes such as technology and fashion into the content, has a wonderful appeal, can always quickly catch the user's attention and generate user stickiness, and the dissemination power of content with rich imagination should not be underestimated.

02 Integration of product and sales

Secondly, it is the integration of product and sales. Many times, we see brands often describe marketing effects as "brand-effect integration", but in Mr. Bingfa's opinion, today's brand marketing is more inclined to "brand-sales integration", which means that brand marketing effects and product sales are integrated into one.

For a long time, there has been a popular saying in the advertising industry: "I know that 50% of my advertising expenses are wasted, but I don't know which half", which means that 50% of advertising expenses are ineffective. With the vigorous development of the big data industry, the diversification of communication channels, and changes in user lifestyles, the effectiveness of advertising communication has also begun to shift towards quantifiable ones, such as the live streaming sales that many brands now choose.

As a carrier of "product and sales integration", live streaming has successfully attracted the attention of many brands in the past 2021. They have flocked to top anchors such as Li Jiaqi and Luo Yonghao. On the one hand, it is because the big names are extremely strict in selecting products, and the cooperation between brands and anchors can enhance their own influence and communication. On the other hand, the top anchors' strong ability to bring goods can help brands quickly realize their value and achieve the product and sales integration that the brand has always dreamed of. At the same time, in order to save on booth fees, many brands have set up their own live broadcast rooms, hoping to help brand development through novel marketing models.

In the past year, e-commerce live streaming can be said to have ushered in explosive growth. According to the "2021 China Live Streaming E-Commerce Industry Research Report" released by the China International E-Commerce Center Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, the overall scale of live streaming sales in my country in 2021 alone was close to 2 trillion. According to data from the "48th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet", as of June 2021, the user scale of e-commerce live streaming is extremely large, reaching 384 million, accounting for 38.0% of the total number of netizens.

It can be seen that the product and sales integration model such as live streaming will still be the focus of brand attention in 2022 and the direction of brand efforts.

03 Cultivation Marketing

In other words, cultivation marketing is a marketing model in which brands cater to user habits and accompany each other in growth. The backbone of this marketing model is the Generation Z user group represented by the post-00s, and it is also a people-oriented marketing model. Different from the people-oriented model, cultivation marketing, while being people-oriented, emphasizes that the relationship between the brand and the user should be "accompaniment and witnessing."

For example, Fenghua, which attracted public attention in 2021, is because users have witnessed the brand's silent hard work over the past 10 years. It has only raised prices once in 10 years, did not change its packaging but insisted on focusing on product quality, etc., and has attracted the attention of users. Because of the company and witness of users, users wanted to desperately buy Fenghua products and help Fenghua design the product appearance, which became an event marketing and achieved a surge in sales of its products.

In this era of fast branding, the example of Fenghua taking 10 years to sharpen its sword may not be replicated in time, but we can still see the role and effect of cultivation marketing in Fenghua, which has the characteristics of intimacy, attraction, and communication power.

04 Category Segmentation

In the past few years, brands have been able to capture users' minds by segmenting their product categories and occupying new tracks, becoming leaders in the highly competitive market. Those brands that were the first to carry out category segmentation have gained great attention and successfully reaped the first wave of market dividends.

For example, Yuanqi Forest, which focuses on health attributes and launched 0 calories, 0 fat, and 0 sugar (0 sucrose); Weizhixiang, which focuses on pre-prepared meals and successfully listed on the A-share market; Wang Baobao, which targets the healthy food track and launches healthy, non-irritating, and burden-free "baked oatmeal"; Chunfeng, a new tea brand that pays attention to the punk health crowd and launches products for staying up late and fat-removing water; Xiaolu Lanlan, which focuses on baby snacks and achieved a first-time transaction of nearly 4 million during the 618 shopping festival in 2021; Ubras, which creates comfortable underwear, launches size-free underwear products, and achieved sales of over 100 million yuan during both the 618 shopping festival and Double 11 shopping festivals...

Although these emerging brands belong to different industries, were founded at different times and have different brand strengths, they have all grasped the more refined needs of users in the fiercely competitive market, carried out category segmentation, and used a differentiated marketing concept as the support point of the brand. They have successfully leveraged their own user base on Xinsaisao, and occupied the red ocean after the category segmentation through user sedimentation and breakthroughs in marketing concepts.

It can be said that for a long time in the future, category segmentation marketing will remain the main theme of the market.

05 Full-link Marketing Methodology

If you want to attract as many users as possible, choosing only one marketing strategy may have little effect. In this era, if you want to influence users' cognition and seize their fragmented time, you need to conduct full-link marketing. Use multiple channels and methods over a long period of time to build user awareness of the brand, thereby changing user purchasing decisions and reducing the brand's customer acquisition costs.

For example, the Angus MAX Thick Beef Burger marketing launched by McDonald's not long ago has established its own full-link communication path, choosing the game IP "Clash of Clans" and winning traffic for the brand by establishing a model of "IP (Clash of Clans IP) + private domain (social/community interaction) + channel (Tik Tok live broadcast, Meituan, Dianping)" as the path. It is worth mentioning that in the live broadcast jointly launched by McDonald’s and Douyin’s emerging live broadcast channel and the master of the “Clash of Clans” game, in addition to the 200% increase in fans in the live broadcast room, the transaction volume of its Douyin Gold Store also increased by 200%.

In addition to McDonald’s online full-link marketing strategy, the brand’s offline advertising based on its own user groups (such as elevator advertising, building advertising, subway large-screen advertising, etc.), as well as advertising on social media, knowledge apps and other channels, can all constitute the brand’s full-link marketing. Which marketing channels a brand chooses to form its full-link marketing depends on its own target audience.

Final Thoughts

In addition, sports marketing will also be a hot topic in the future. In the past 2021, there have been a lot of explosive marketing, including creative content, live streaming with impressive sales data, cutting-edge brands using new marketing methods, knowing how to grasp user pain points and itch points for segmentation, and targeted marketing, etc. By creating marketing that fits their own temperament and tone, brands have helped achieve dissemination, demonstrated the unlimited potential of these marketing methods, and become samples that brands are eager to learn and refer to.

Author: Marketing Strategy

Source: Marketing Strategy