2021 was a tumultuous year for business. Emerging from months of stifling lockdowns and sanctions, brands have struggled to establish successful post-pandemic growth strategies that generate revenue whilst building brand awareness. Consumers want to feel protected from the impact of the pandemic.
An essential element of your growth strategy for 2022 should be closely monitoring your local and national situation and adjusting your processes as guidelines change. If you fail to stay ahead of the curve, your customers will opt-in favour of businesses that are more progressive in their approach to accomodating the ever-changing impact of COVID.
Go hybrid
The future of the best work-life balance is hybrid working. A flexible working pattern where staff divide their time between the workplace and working remotely, the positive impact of hybrid working upon recruitment, diversity and employee satisfaction correlates directly to increased productivity in your workforce. Hybrid working will give your team greater freedom and trust, eliminating the dreaded work commute and punishing office hours. Technology can allow us to work smarter, obtaining balance and better wellbeing. For hybrid working to be most effective, harness the cloud's power and transition to a platform that is at the helm of the next digital commerce stage. Your brand needs to be accessed from anywhere in the world, so move away from your physical shop floor space to a higher place in the cloud.
Keep up with trends in social media
One in four online purchases is now made via an interaction with a social media platform. This trend looks set to increase rapidly throughout 2022, with the likelihood of more augmented reality features and the option to checkout in-app.
Throughout 2021 video marketing has become a central element of brand content strategies. With the stratospheric growth of TikTok and Instagram, both championing a shift towards video content, the importance of quality video content will continue to grow into 2022. In addition, short-form videos leverage more likes and generate higher levels of engagement than two-dimensional content. As a result, 2022 will platform more brands embracing video trends and features while providing value to their target audiences.
Marketing brands will prioritise building long-term paid partnerships and collaborations with influencers. Influencers will take centre stage as brand ambassadors in place of #ad promoters, a strategy that does not perform well regarding click-through rates. A Google survey found that 40% of millennial YouTube subscribers reported that their favourite creator communicates and resonates with them more profoundly than their friends IRL. Direct, trusted access to an audience is powerful. By harnessing such profound relatability, a brand will be able to communicate more meaningfully with their consumers, creating a long-lasting relationship.
Keep up with trends in technology
Promoting customer and employee confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy Total Experience (TX) is a key growth trend within technology for 2022. Customer experience, employee experience and end-user experience will all be combined to improve efficiency and productivity.
Generative artificial intelligence (GAN) - This technology creates new content, generated from existing text, audio files, or images. With generative AI, computers recognise an underlying pattern related to common input and produce similar content. GAN can create code, target marketing, identify new products and more.
Hyper-automation is a key trend for 2022 because it enables businesses to digitalise and automate their processes. Defined as a collection of technologies that facilitate the transformation of an organisation's processes with a combined and intuitive system, hyper-automation focuses on quality, speed and enhancing decision-making with an increased focus on governance to heighten operational resiliency and agility.
Data fabric facilitates self-service data consumption, embeds governance, and automates the data integration process. 2022 will see brands aspiring to optimise big data for faster insights. By embracing these methods, businesses can reduce data inconsistency and compliance risk and improve data quality, a win-win tactic for growth.
Utilise a flywheel
An essential strategy for refining the consumers purchasing journey, the flywheel had a real moment in 2021. With a well-conceptualised flywheel, brands can build new leads and land sales whilst organically growing products or services.
When combined with a CRM, a flywheel can guide consumers effortlessly from the point of interest to sale with minimal input from your team, leaving employees free to concentrate on developing important projects rather than managing the menial.
Host events, podcasts and webinars
Living remotely from one another for the past two years, the power of physical presence has never felt more important. Networking and events were an impossibility throughout the pandemic, however, both are now back with a bang. Integral to growing your brand recognition, events generate interest in products and services, increasing visibility and relatability, so get busy conceptualising your next product launch or brand anniversary and get chatting to the people who invest in your business, now is the time!
Podcasts (check ours out) and webinars are great strategies for maximising your brand's reach. Attributing personality and a voice to your product or service, audiences can casually engage with your business, playing your content whilst working or travelling. Educating your audience, offering value beyond the product or service demonstrates a progressive attitude towards brand identity, working to the 2022 ethos that profit means more than making money.
