..If you think you’re opening up another “personalized, humanized content is the key driver for success” write-up, you’re in the wrong. We thought our readers must be getting pretty tired of online marketing trends articles, so we actually analyzed what’s really going on across the digital print on demand landscape and what the future really holds for all of us.
While many things are going on across the Internet space, many appear, disappear, and are replaced by other relevant ones. Like the impulse from the unicorn Clubhouse, where Elon Musk entertained discussions of current topics (colonies on Mars, crypto, AI, and vaccination), the ups and downs of ratings, companies, and opinions have now become a normal phenomenon. The same applies to digital marketing trends 2021, which subsequently turned into a promising direction. Remember, voice search and AI, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, were introduced by many companies as outstanding and quite effective strategies.
Accelerated technology has led to a change in user habits and a corresponding demand for products. Now, real-time simulating face-to-face interactions with chatbots have become especially popular. New needs have arisen, such as privacy and non-tracking (e.g., through the well-known cookies). In light of recent events, when the average total cost of a data breach increased from $ 3.86 million to $ 4.24 million in 2021, most users have become more cautious about utilizing personal information for commercial purposes. The same goes for mailing – because of the real threat of phishing, ransomware, and malware. So if we talk about trends in marketing, it is worth understanding that they are fleeting, dependent on the global political, economic, and social environment, and most likely, they are fads (e.g., as your friends' Insta Stories.) So instead of discussing the standard tenets of the digital world, we've picked up a couple of spicy “trends” that will help promote your POD brand in the long run. Are you ready to see what the future looks like? Here we go.
The latest eCommerce trends that match POD business promotion
Privacy-driven marketing
eCommerce marketing now has a new face: the long line of privacy scandals (e.g., Meta and WhatsApp) has reinforced users' belief that there's no such thing as a free lunch. If you want to save face and not become part of another mess, you must pay the sites to keep quiet. The web applications will have to change their privacy policy to be more transparent about tracking. This practice is unsafe because it can lead to losses or affect paid traffic revenue flows. This also happened to Snapchat, which lost about 30% of its stock value due to new rules implemented by Apple.
What can this have to do with POD business? According to statistics, about 96% of US users opt-out of app tracking in iOS, indicating the failure of the data collection campaign and possible errors in segmenting their own audience. However, Google took it one step further, introducing the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) initiative. It's a semi-anonymous alternative to cookies that will allow you to advertise based on your online interests without revealing your identity. This signals the manual collection of information through emails, surveys, and personal conversations for marketers. It will make targeting more complex, and the marketer's work will become much more resource-intensive. Customer Acquisition Costs will have to increase, but attracting organic traffic will still be quoted.
Three T’s marketing
Mobile marketing trends indicate the popularity of TikTok, Twitch, and The Goldfish myth.
And even if today the social networking market is dominated by Meta, one cannot deny the powerful influence of a strong player, TikTok. As of January 2022, the number of active users on the platform exceeded 1 billion. It brings together people between the ages of 10 and 49, or even older, with a good focus on selling POD products.
Why are there goldfishes? These exciting animals have one unique feature – they have a mere 3-second recall. Like fish, influencer marketing trends evolve with their 15-16 second action videos. In addition, people now generally lose concentration after 8 seconds, a side effect of the move to mobile Internet. But there's also nothing wrong with long content. It is more informative and can extend the session to the end of your story. After all, people are better than goldfishes!
Twitch also has an active user audience. Live streaming on the platform only fuels interest in experimentation. Introducing sponsored content, native advertising, and influencer marketing will improve the competitive edge of any brand.
Human2Human
Now it's not enough to have a quality product, excellent delivery, or optimal prices. The brand defines humanity, culture, and values. Whether you're Dolce Gabbana or a company selling tie-dye t-shirts, your communication has to have the human in mind. This trend is probably related to the pandemic and complex global geopolitical relations.
Now the tone of voice across the board is getting more accessible, funny, comfortable, casual, generally accepted, and vice versa, something that bursts out somewhere from the depths of the soul.
How to choose the promising strategy?
Recently, humanity has become more conscious of the process of buying things. Digital marketing trends have become environmentally friendly, transparent, inclusive, diverse, and fair. If your company adheres to any principles, you should choose a site optimization strategy and eliminate irritants that are likely to increase the bounce rate. For example, you're struggling to keep up with the pace of demand, still trying to hold on to your old customers. So the first thing you should do is utilize Google trends to find the best products. Next, test a line of breakthrough products. Identify the best sellers and continue to work with them. You can try to run on other platforms for those products that sell worse. That's how you get to omnichannel marketing and meet the needs of a small segment of the audience. Take care to implement an adaptive design and inclusive features (e.g., audio descriptions for images) – these will expand your customer base and create new value for the brand. Employ ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) to facilitate the reading of the webpage via stricture scripts and widgets. This is just a tiny part of what your strategy might look like.
To choose the best option for promotion, you should be guided by brand values. But due to the management of many processes, sometimes they can get lost sight of. To prevent such an unfortunate outcome, pay attention to marketing automation trends:
- Advanced use of AI to power chatbots, analyze behavioral patterns and automate email campaigns.
- Emphasis on omnichannel experience to provide the correct information at the right time to the right user.
- Prevalence of consumer skepticism and hyper-personalization help to add a personal or human touch to all the automated processes.
Yes, last year's email marketing trends work differently now: it's not enough to write a standout subject line. As mentioned, this is due to cyber-attacks and the changing consumer psychology. Predictive lead scoring helps you determine each lead's quality and eliminates the need for contacting them in person.
The same goes for social media management: integrating sophisticated chatbots that can simulate interactive human conversations helps marketers create a personalized customer experience for different stages of the buyer’s journey. Learn more about Facebook marketing tips to manage your POD store even more successfully.
Top Strategies to Successfully Sell your Print on Demand Merchandize Online
How to plan budgets in 2022?
Over the past two years, marketing budgeting has become one of the hottest topics on the professional sidelines: they dropped to a record 6.4% of the company's revenue in 2021. Except that the expectations from the marketing teams keep rising!
You should be guided by flexibility, efficiency, and measurability to budget correctly based on marketing industry trends. There will always be a need for strong, astute marketing talent: only a professional can curb cutting-edge technology. Similar to investing too much in technology rather than talent, we would be remiss not to take into consideration the current marketing trends:
- Performance marketing is still a reasonable expenditure. Ensure you have the proper footage to give you a picture of performance across all channels.
- Investing in long-term brand building will undoubtedly affect future ratings. Otherwise, there is a high probability of damaging its activities.
- Using social listening or monitoring topics, issues, keywords, etc., outside of your own channels, you can collect web design ideas and extend them to other areas of digital marketing (crisis communications, influencer management, and customer research).
A solid budget will help manage the risks and prioritize a healthy mix of technology and talent…
