New changes in marketing in 2022

The first wave of marketing boom in 2022 was born around the Spring Festival, dominating the hot search lists of major platforms.

As a viewer, "searching while scrolling, searching while watching" has become the new normal for surfing the Internet during this period. It has to be said that this smooth and rich experience is really addictive.

And when millions of users begin to deeply enjoy this search experience, such a huge search "torrent" is opening up a marketing imagination space centered on "search".

In the era of mobile Internet, how will search redefine marketing? Let’s listen to Party A’s detailed interpretation of the major trends in digital marketing in 2022.

01 2022, aiming at the bullseye of digital marketing

Confidence in the digital marketing market has been raised once again.

The intuitive survey results of the "2022 Search Marketing Budget Trend Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") recently released by CTR CCTV Research Institute show that the Chinese advertising market showed a recovery in 2021, with advertising rate charges in the first half of the year increasing by 23% year-on-year.

The higher the traffic reaches, the more determined the marketing should be. This is not the result of internal friction in the industry, but the current situation of companies that are either advancing or retreating in the tide of economic stimulus.

According to the report, in 2021, advertisers are optimistic about the overall domestic economic situation, and their confidence in the industry development prospects and their own operating conditions has fully recovered, entering an upward cycle at the level of subjective initiative.

With confidence, action will naturally follow. On the premise that advertising spending will recover in 2021, 2022 will be a big year for advertising and marketing.

42.9% of advertisers are expected to increase their investment in digital marketing, including some large advertisers with advertising spending exceeding 500 million, and these companies will be more "aggressive" in spending on digital marketing and promotion.

Hundreds of boats compete to cross the river, each carrying its own weight. In the ever-changing advertising and marketing industry, everyone is looking for the next opportunity to hit the traffic bull's eye.

The report shows that global advertising spending in 2021 increased by 19.9% ​​year-on-year, of which digital advertising saw the most significant growth, with a growth rate of nearly 30%. Among digital marketing, search advertising had a particularly eye-catching growth rate of 29.3%, becoming an important driving force for the growth of media advertising spending.

At the same time, the ranking order of domestic marketing placements in 2021 is short videos, information flow, live broadcast, and big V/public account soft articles, and search advertising ranks fifth; in 2022, advertisers who are expected to net increase their search advertising budgets will surpass the demand for public account soft articles and jump to fourth place, achieving a total growth of 21.5%, becoming a major part of the growth of domestic advertising budgets.

A duck knows first when the water in the river warms in spring. A considerable number of advertisers on the front line of marketing choose to favor search ads in order to aim at the marketing bull's eye in 2022.

02 Search advertising, what brands want

Why has search advertising become the unanimous choice in the field of digital marketing both at home and abroad, and thus formed a trend? Three characteristics can be seen from the budget allocation of advertisers:

●Big: tend to be large platforms

The fact that the advertising budget is moving closer to the leading platforms is a fact that real money is being spent.

The "Digital 2021: Global Overview Report" points out that in the era of mobile Internet, users' attention has been concentrated on mobile phones, and the average user spends more than 43.1% of their time outside of sleep on mobile phones. On mobile terminals, the siphon effect of TOP-level applications is becoming more and more obvious, with the top 25 apps accounting for more than 40% of usage time.

This represents the concentrated convergence of user traffic. After advertising marketing has moved from the classical single centralized model to the kaleidoscope distributed model, it has returned to a certain degree of concentration distribution.

Therefore, the budget allocation of advertisers has obviously changed - the decision-making model has shifted from being dominated by advertising form to being dominated by platform. Simply put, advertisers prefer to achieve dissemination and sales in more accurate and direct advertising forms in places where traffic is concentrated.

In a platform-led decision-making model, the core consideration is naturally platform traffic. Especially when the Internet traffic dividend has reached its peak, platforms with large stock are undoubtedly the first choice for enterprises. This applies to all types of enterprises of different sizes and industries.

New: Platform innovation

Pursuing the leading platform means seeking stable traffic, and pursuing innovation means seeking refined traffic.

New platforms or new traffic will undoubtedly bring advertisers greater choices and more refined reach, and innovative interactive methods will be promoted to new marketing opportunities.

Marketing pursues the principle of liking new things and getting tired of old things. For this reason, as many as 69.5% of advertisers said that they would pay more attention to the platform's innovation capabilities when conducting digital marketing, and as many as 80% of advertisers are willing to try new platforms and new advertising formats. Advertisers from all walks of life seem to be looking forward to the outbreak of the "next traffic", just like the waves of live streaming and short videos.

● Lian: Integrated Marketing

The report shows that 91.7% of advertisers accept the integration of various resources, advertising formats, technical capabilities, etc. in a large, rich and three-dimensional ecosystem to achieve integrated marketing.

From the perspective of brands, the value judgment criteria of different channels and media can perhaps be divided into three dimensions: ecology, diversity of forms and technology.

The ecosystem is easy to understand. The perfect combination of traffic and content is an excellent backing for a marketing campaign. Diversity of forms involves effectiveness. When different platforms and product combinations are launched, differentiated combinations are needed to produce chemical effects in order to achieve the added value of increasing exposure and conversion efficiency. Technology is the prerequisite for precise reach, focusing on ROI (return on investment) and direct conversion, and putting forward new requirements for platform and media analysis and reach skills.

Under the marketing trend of "big, new, and connected", search advertising can conform to these three characteristics and effectively meet the needs of advertisers to tap new traffic and achieve efficient integrated marketing in a powerful content ecosystem.

Different from the dominance of PC search engines, large domestic Internet companies currently have different ecosystem search advertising layouts, and the models have broken away from the inherent paradigm of search engines, such as social ecosystem search, e-commerce ecosystem search, content ecosystem search, etc.

Among them, search advertising in the content ecosystem can be regarded as a new face. The higher the user's stickiness in the content ecosystem, the easier it is to bind search habits, thereby generating new search touchpoints, which can be regarded as new traffic and new forms in the eyes of advertisers.

In terms of budget alone, in 2022, advertisers expect their budgets to increase in the top three options of Bytedance search ads, Xiaohongshu search ads, and Zhihu search ads, accounting for more than 80%, among which Bytedance has the highest orientation, reaching 42.1%. This demonstrates that advertisers are very willing to invest in content ecosystem search advertising.

At the same time, search is also an important hub for integrated marketing: it is not only a brand port for aggregating multi-channel traffic, but also a multiple continuation of target population coverage, and can also be a collaborative touchpoint for users in different scenarios, thus becoming an important end point for online marketing chains.

It is nothing more than that search advertising has become a budget magnet for advertisers' marketing efforts.

03 What does “heuristic search” in the content ecosystem inspire?

After more than 20 years of development, user search behavior has actually become quite resistant.

In addition to active demand, users' search habits and scenarios have undergone tremendous changes with the rise of social media platforms and content platforms.

Bytedance once made a judgment that "interesting content stimulates search interest" and believed that the "new search" trend characterized by content stimulation + video search + post-viewing search has been formed.

At the Engine Conference 2022, Bytedance redefined the new search trend it had previously proposed as "heuristic search." This may be another innovation in the search industry, which will start a journey full of unexpected surprises for users and also open up incremental space for search advertising for brands.

We can understand this new concept from three perspectives:

●For users: a new normal behavior

On content platforms, users are inspired by content and develop a habit of searching while browsing, and the behavioral chain is completed on the same platform.

From the data dimension, in August 2021, the daily search PV of Toutiao and Douyin reached 500 million. On average, each Douyin user initiated at least one search behavior every day, and the search content changed from account search in 2019 (accounting for 68%) to content search (accounting for 65%).

This has considerable commercial potential, and will advance the user's consumption pattern from browsing and swiping in shelf-based e-commerce to browsing and searching in the interest-based e-commerce ecosystem.

●For marketing: a new hub for marketing

In the content ecology, "heuristic search" can smoothly connect the content of interest, open up the front-end and back-end links from seeing to searching, use content as a clue, realize the coordinated linkage of people, traffic, and scenarios, and become the hub of integrated marketing.

This judgment has its reasons. According to the report, 86.1% of advertisers recognize the platform value of massive search engine advertising, and 64.6% of advertisers believe that massive search engine advertising is an important hub for integrated marketing.

●For brands: new marketing value

"Heuristic search" can bring four new values ​​to the brand.

Placement value: Search advertising itself has brand repeatability, which is an advantage that other forms cannot match. Brands can occupy the position for a long time, allowing users to reach them through search at any time, becoming a "fixed stall" in a marketing sense, thereby occupying traffic.

Conversion value: interest stimulation - search reach - consumption conversion is the user link of interest e-commerce. As a marketing depression in the blue ocean stage, heuristic search can improve conversion efficiency and realize sales value.

Asset value: As a subjective behavior, search can bring extremely high-intent fans to the brand, divert and settle high-willing fans, and help the brand accumulate long-term brand assets.

Synergy value: As a marketing hub, search can be combined with tools and products, combined with different gameplay to multiply the effect, and can fully play the role of closing the marketing funnel. According to the official data from ByteDance, the combination of information flow + search can achieve a 14% increase in exposure and a 24% increase in conversions compared to the information flow alone.

Heuristic search not only inspires users, but also brands: how to use search to weave their own marketing network.

04 Massive Engine, weaving a network that is “extended in all directions”

“Users search, brands invest”—the essential logic of search advertising.

Search advertising based on content ecology is itself an extremely complex and personalized marketing scenario, which requires massive data as decision-making support.

It is a connecting link.

For example, through bidding ads, brand zones, hot lists + hot product specials, search can take over users' active search interests and convert interests into behavioral searches. For example, in the Winter Olympics, Yili, as the official partner of the Beijing Winter Olympics, launched a combination of search ads with the slogan #耀出冬奥新姿態, which naturally connected users' search interests and achieved more than 40 million exposures in a single day.

It is still a guiding link.

Rooted in the content ecosystem, Bytedance's search ads can realize the added value of content searches to extend related brand products and achieve secondary integration beyond information flow delivery. Whether it is the launch of new La Mer products, promotions and joint activities; or Yadea playing sticker tasks and sending benefits during the Spring Festival, or World of Warcraft launching topics related to the New Year limited edition gift package, all of these are brand exposure, interaction and even conversion guided by search.

It is also a resonance link.

The root associations of various searches are the core context that initially dominated the Internet. When search associations occur in the content ecosystem, they will produce resonances of multiple effects such as content + brand, content + multiple brands, and brand + brand.

In such a path, content is both the cause and result of the search. In theory, when the content presentation always meets the interests of the user, infinite resonance extension of triggering and searching can be achieved.

Therefore, Bytedance has woven a sufficiently strong network for "heuristic search" to support effective user searches within the platform.

One is the content ecological network. The two major platforms, Douyin and Toutiao, cover almost all types of current mainstream content carriers, such as text, pictures, videos, live broadcasts, etc. They have a very wide coverage and diverse display methods, which has accumulated a very rich content pool for "heuristic search".

The content ecosystem can support its result display and decision-making guidance functions, help users obtain positive feedback from searches, and thus gradually bind users' search behaviors within the platform ecosystem. The heuristic search based on content ecology, with its own commercial possibilities, will undoubtedly become the next new Internet traffic option, and this option is closely linked to consumption.

One is the traffic channel network. The merchant's global marketing behavior itself suffers from losses due to differences between different channels and cannot achieve the optimal expression of integrated marketing and operations.

At the previous Engine Conference 2022, ByteDance proposed to integrate full capabilities of all content, all links, all scenarios, and all data to help business operators establish long-term, content-driven growth capabilities and open up a new path of "marketing and operations" integration.

Among them, "heuristic search" is the important hub for brands to achieve efficient coordination of traffic, content, services, etc., and connect front-end marketing exposure traffic acquisition, back-end sales conversion and asset accumulation.

05 Party A’s Financial Thoughts

Infinitely close to the real needs of users

Essentially, search is a content service. Advertising is a secondary empowerment based on human needs.

Search advertising is the first gateway to users’ real needs. It is an efficient way for brands to communicate with users and for users to meet their needs in an era of complex information. It is also a conversion pool for brand marketing.

Analogizing to the e-commerce industry, its core values ​​are nothing more than information and delivery. The classic model of matching user and product demand information with shelf-style waterfall flow display has made the core of the competition in the first half of e-commerce traffic and products.

Search is one of the most core matching methods at this time, and it becomes a high-speed channel for products to reach users directly.

When a platform is able to generate enough traffic to trigger a "qualitative change", search will be able to do more. Such imagination space may be the main topic of discussion for quite some time.

Author: Party A Finance

Source: Party A Finance