10 Latest Marketing Software Trends & Forecasts for 2024

Economic globalization and rapid technological advancements led to dramatic changes in the global marketing industry. Today, modern marketing puts the spotlight on customer satisfaction, placing consumers as the top priority in business operations versus sales and product quality. The myriad digital innovations existing today have also changed the way businesses bring value to their customers.

As the marketing industry continues to broaden its scope, business owners and marketing professionals are implementing more effective marketing strategies to reach a wide variety of audiences. For many organizations, marketing is a key element that drives growth to their business and increases profit and revenue.

To help your organization keep up with the ever-changing marketing industry, we compiled the latest marketing trends in 2022 that you should look out for. The article provides an in-depth discussion of marketing software trends, too, including recent marketing software tools, reports, and data that you should know.

As a fast-paced and constantly evolving industry, marketing is way more complicated than coming up with a strategy to build brands. Over the years, it has developed into an intricate blend of technology and approaches. With the help of modern marketing tools, businesses are now more than capable of establishing a better relationship with customers, which translates to increased sales and profit.

In the digital era, one of the biggest challenges faced by marketing teams and professionals is generating traffic and leads. According to a recent report by HubSpot, 47% of marketers believe that among the hurdles their organization is dealing with, traffic and lead generation are among the biggest. This is followed by providing ROI to their marketing activities and delivering an account-based marketing strategy (HubSpot, 2021).

With most organizations now migrating their businesses into the cloud, it comes as no surprise that generating traffic and leads is a serious challenge for many marketing teams. Fortunately, there exists a wide range of accessible technological solutions that can help businesses improve their sales and marketing campaigns. These include social media profiling, big data and plenty of modern and AI-enabled marketing tools.

Being aware of the most relevant marketing trends in 2022 should also help your business remain competitive and win more new and loyal customers. Below is a compilation of the latest marketing and marketing software trends that you must look out for.

1. Social Media Marketing

Social media today sits at the center of all marketing strategies for modern organizations. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networking sites are becoming popular marketing platforms where businesses can promote their brand, products, and services. Social media has also allowed businesses to engage with existing customers and reach new ones.

In a report published by the Pew Research Center, almost 84% of individuals aged 18 to 29 years old use social media in their daily lives. Meanwhile, 81% of adults aged 30 to 49 are active social media users (Pew Research Center, 2021).

The report suggests that young adults are most active on social media and have the broadest access to smartphones. Knowing this social media statistic can help businesses identify which platform would yield the most interactions for their social media marketing campaigns.

There are many reasons why marketing professionals find social media marketing as a must for their organization. First, social media makes brand building more simple and effective. By leveraging the most used social media platforms of target customers, businesses can quickly increase awareness of their brand and reach the right people for their products.

Various studies also suggest that social networking sites have the highest lead-to-close rates compared to any other forms of marketing. For instance, a recent report from OptinMonster reveals that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing (OptinMonster, 2021). This means having marketing campaigns on social media can lead businesses to a vast network of potential customers.

2. Digital Brand Management

For businesses today, a digital presence is just as important as its traditional marketing and physical location. To best appeal to a target audience, a brand needs its presence to be felt in various digital platforms, such as social media and other blogs and websites. After all, it takes around 5 to 7 impressions before people start to remember a brand (Pam Moore, 2021).

Taking advantage of digital platforms and branding techniques can help businesses make a lasting impression for their brand. By customizing marketing content and publishing them regularly on sites, apps, and social media pages, businesses can improve their brand’s visibility and deliver unique content to existing and potential customers.

Part of an effective blog marketing strategy and digital brand marketing is portraying the same brand identity across multiple communication channels. This includes how an organization’s brand is presented in emails, video marketing content, PowerPoint presentations, marketing trends podcast episodes, or digital newsletters. As a result, more businesses today are investing on best practice templates that reflect their brand aesthetics, such as colors, logo, and symbols.

3. Personalized Email Marketing

In recent years, personalized emails have become a popular marketing trend among businesses that want to capture their customer’s attention. Also, many businesses find that a personalized email content actually improves their clickthrough rates. By customizing emails based on each subscriber’s gender, location, age, or interests, emails sent out by businesses are much more likely to be read by their customers.

In a recent report by Invesp, 80% of online shoppers believe that personalization is most important in emails as compared to other communication channels (Invesp, 2021). Through personalized emails, businesses can engage their customers’ interests and prioritize their needs. In this way, companies can strengthen customer experience and deliver appropriate services and recommendations to the right people at the right time.

Fortunately, there are plenty of email automation tools that can help businesses personalize their emails. Most email automation platforms leverage existing customer data to provide a much more targeted and customized customer experience.

4. Influencer Marketing

One of the latest marketing trends right now is influencer marketing, a marketing tactic made possible through collaboration between brands and influencers. The idea behind influencer marketing is basically just based on celebrity endorsements, but instead of celebrities, businesses are investing on influencers who have a huge number of followers to promote their brands.

Because of their authority, position, knowledge, or relationship with their followers, influencers have the power to affect the purchasing decisions of most online customers. The large followings on the web and social media that influencers have is exactly what most brands need in their online marketing campaigns. Thus, most companies today rely on influencers to market their brands and products.

In Linqia’s annual influencer marketing trends 2021 report, one of the key findings reveal that 90% of enterprise marketers desire to work with micro-influencers. This is up from 80% in 2020, which only means that there are now more companies recognizing the potential of influencer marketing for their brands (Linqia, 2021). As interest in influencer marketing grows, more brands today are building relationships with influencers who can resonate with their core company values and create effective marketing campaigns.

5. Chatbots

In the past few years, business chatbots have been growing dynamically, managing to take over many sectors within an organization, including the marketing department of most companies. With a chatbot marketing tool, businesses now have the capability to automate customer interactions up to a certain point before they are directed to the right marketing staff for assistance. Chatbots also come in handy for generating leads and driving more sales.

Powered by artificial intelligence, chatbots help businesses in providing customers with real-time interactions, especially after office hours when no agent is available to answer customer queries. As one chatbot marketing trends example, Facebook now utilizes bots with its Messenger feature, enabling businesses to engage with their customers using automated responses.

According to Chatbot Life, the United States accounts for the largest portion of the world’s chatbot users with a share of 36%. This is followed by India at 11% and Germany in third place at 4% (Chatbots Life, 2021).

6. Video Marketing

Marketing has certainly evolved beyond slogans, logos, and pictures. In fact, video marketing is now one of the most relevant marketing trends today, and businesses have recognized its potential as a powerful technique for increasing sales. Short-form videos, in particular, are driving the popularity of video marketing for most organizations.

As of 2020, 60% of Internet traffic revolves around video content (Colormatics, 2020). Social media platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts are even expanding their short-form video offerings to accommodate more possibilities in video editing, and brands are starting to take notice. With more Internet users consuming online videos on a daily basis, it comes as no surprise that video marketing is growing more popular among businesses.

7. Marketing Automation

Marketing is not really a simple process, and it takes a lot of hard work to come up and implement an effective marketing strategy. With so many marketing channels existing today, it becomes more complicated for businesses to keep track of the results generated by their marketing campaigns. Aside from that, businesses also face the challenge of delivering the right content at the right time and to the right customers to nurture customers’ trust and loyalty for their brand.

With the latest marketing software trends in automation solutions, businesses now have the means to create one-on-one and consistent cross-channel marketing experience for their customers. Marketing automation tools also allow businesses to deliver a more connected and personalized customer experience.

As a growing trend, marketing automation enables small and large businesses to keep up with the evolving and increasing demands of consumers. According to a recent report by Emailmonday, 51% of companies today are already using marketing automation tools, while 58% have plans to adopt the technology (Emailmonday, 2021).

Leading Business Process Management Software

1. Studio Creatio Enterprise. This platform has preconfigured solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service that allow you to use it out of the box. Other than that, it has powerful features for other business processes that you can read about in this Studio Creatio Enterprise review.
2. Promapp. With this solution, you can monitor your business processes even as they change in real-time, letting you revolutionize operations on the go. Learn more about what else you can do with this platform in our Promapp review.
3. Wrike. This is a software where you can manage all projects relating to different business processes like marketing and sales. Discover other capabilities and benefits you can gain in this Wrike review.
4. Nintex. By automating business workflows, this application empowers users regardless of the platform or device they are using. This Nintex review discusses its key features for you to understand the software better.
5. monday.com. This highly customizable software allows you to tailor it to your needs, enabling you to streamline any kind of process such as marketing. Our comprehensive monday.com review can tell you more about its capabilities.

8. Mobile Optimization

It is no secret that mobile technology today continues to become more advanced. Also, more people now use mobile devices as part of their daily lives. As a result, businesses have to take their marketing efforts up a notch by optimizing content across multiple channels. This includes optimizing for mobile in order to increase sales and reach more customers.

Mobile marketing allows for unprecedented access to existing and potential customers. According to the latest mobile marketing statistics, 80% of mobile users purchase products from businesses that have easy-to-navigate mobile sites and apps (Aum, 2021). This only proves that mobile-adaptive websites bring in more unique customers and increase the chances of people buying from businesses.

9. Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising refers to the selling and buying of digital advertising space. It enables businesses to effectively capture the attention of digital consumers. Using highly advanced and smart targeting tactics, a programmatic advertising platform segments audiences using the marketing data collected from digital channels. In this way, advertisers and marketers will only pay for the ads delivered to their target audience.

The digital marketing industry soars to new heights every day. As a result, programmatic advertising also maintains its position as a dominant advertising method. In the coming years, programmatic advertising is only expected to rise as the buying and selling of digital advertising space becomes more sought-after.

From $63 billion in 2020, programmatic ad spend is set to reach nearly $100 billion in 2022 (ROI Revolution, 2021). As businesses recognize the potential of programmatic advertising in terms of reaching more highly relevant audiences at scale, it is no wonder marketing teams are investing their budgets into the technology.

10. Big Data in Marketing

Big data is changing the way businesses do sales and marketing. By leveraging the technology, businesses get a 360-degree view of their audiences and their online behavior. Big data also provides companies with the necessary business intelligence to generate positive results in their marketing efforts.

Big data also plays a significant role in raising brand awareness for most businesses. According to a recent study by Aberdeen, data-driven retailers experience an annual increase in brand awareness by 2.7 times (Aberdeen, 2021). As a result, more companies today are investing in big data analytics. This is to gain essential marketing data that leads to a broader customer reach.

The Digital Era for Marketing

The trends you have read above only prove that marketing is now at the height of its golden, digital era. As consumers spend more of their time online, it becomes more important than ever for brands to make their presence felt in as many of the sites, apps, and channels as where their target audiences are. Technological developments, such as automation and AI, are also sending down turbulence on the entire marketing ecosystem of most organizations.

No one knows exactly what the future holds for marketing. As a fast-paced industry though, businesses can expect dramatic changes in new consumer desires, personas, and modern marketing strategies. To stay ahead of the curve, it is important for your organization to be adaptive to the changes brought about by the latest developments in the world of marketing.

You may also check out these digital marketing trends to have better ideas on building your own marketing campaigns and strategies.

Key Insights

• Customer-Centric Approach: Modern marketing focuses on customer satisfaction, making it a top priority over sales and product quality.
• Digital Innovation: Technological advancements have revolutionized how businesses provide value to customers.
• Traffic and Lead Generation Challenges: Generating traffic and leads remains a significant challenge, with 47% of marketers identifying it as a primary concern.
• Social Media Dominance: Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are central to contemporary marketing strategies, particularly among younger demographics.
• Personalized Marketing: Customizing emails and other marketing materials based on customer data significantly improves engagement and click-through rates.
• Influencer Marketing Growth: The collaboration between brands and influencers, especially micro-influencers, is on the rise, leveraging their large followings to drive marketing campaigns.
• AI and Automation: Tools like chatbots and marketing automation software are crucial in enhancing customer interactions and streamlining marketing processes.
• Mobile Optimization: Optimizing content for mobile devices is essential, as a significant portion of online shopping is conducted via smartphones.
• Programmatic Advertising: This method of buying and selling digital advertising space is becoming increasingly popular due to its efficiency in targeting specific audiences.
• Big Data Utilization: Leveraging big data analytics helps businesses gain comprehensive insights into customer behavior and improve brand awareness.

FAQ

1. Why is customer satisfaction prioritized over sales and product quality in modern marketing? Customer satisfaction is prioritized because it leads to long-term customer loyalty and retention, which ultimately drives sustained revenue growth. Satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others.
2. What are the biggest challenges faced by marketers in generating traffic and leads? According to a HubSpot report, 47% of marketers identify generating traffic and leads as their biggest challenge. This is followed by providing ROI for marketing activities and delivering account-based marketing strategies.
3. How does social media influence marketing strategies today? Social media platforms are integral to marketing strategies due to their vast user base and ability to target specific demographics. They offer businesses a direct channel to engage with both existing and potential customers, increasing brand awareness and lead conversion rates.
4. What is the impact of personalized email marketing on customer engagement? Personalized email marketing significantly improves customer engagement. Customized emails that cater to the recipient’s interests and behaviors are more likely to be opened and acted upon, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions.
5. How do influencers contribute to marketing campaigns? Influencers, with their large followings and trusted voices, can significantly impact their audience’s purchasing decisions. Collaborating with influencers allows brands to reach wider and more engaged audiences, enhancing their marketing efforts.
6. What role do chatbots play in modern marketing? Chatbots, powered by AI, automate customer interactions, providing real-time responses and assistance. They help businesses manage customer inquiries efficiently, generate leads, and improve customer satisfaction by offering immediate support.
7. Why is mobile optimization crucial for businesses? With the increasing use of smartphones for online shopping and browsing, mobile optimization ensures that websites and apps are user-friendly on mobile devices. This improves the user experience, leading to higher engagement and sales from mobile users.
8. What is programmatic advertising and why is it important? Programmatic advertising involves the automated buying and selling of digital ad space. It uses advanced targeting tactics to ensure ads reach the most relevant audiences, making advertising efforts more efficient and effective.
9. How does big data enhance marketing strategies? Big data provides businesses with detailed insights into customer behavior and preferences. By analyzing this data, companies can tailor their marketing strategies to better meet customer needs, improving customer acquisition and retention rates.

References:

1. Aberdeen. (2021, December 6). Talend: Healthy Data, Healthy Business – Modern Cloud ETL. Aberdeen.
2. Aum. (2021, November 15). The Most Relevant Mobile Marketing Statistics in 2021. Aum.
3. HubSpot. (2021, July 21). 8 of the Top Marketing Challenges Faced Globally [New Data + Expert Tips]. HubSpot.
4. Linqia. (2021, April 20). The State of Influencer Marketing 2021. Linqia.
5. Invesp. (2021, April 11). Online Shopping Personalization – Statistics and Trends. Invesp.
6. OptinMonster. (2021, January 7). Social Selling Statistics for 2022 (Includes Social Media Marketing!). OptinMonster.
7. Pam Moore. (2021, October 4). 50+ Eye-Opening Branding Statistics – 2021 Edition. Pam Moore.
8. Pew Research Center. (2021, April 7). Social Media Fact Sheet. Pew Research Center.
9. ROI Revolution. (2021, December 13). Programmatic Advertising Trends, Stats, & News. ROI Revolution.

By Louie Andre

B2B & SaaS market analyst and senior writer for FinancesOnline. He is most interested in project management solutions, believing all businesses are a work in progress. From pitch deck to exit strategy, he is no stranger to project business hiccups and essentials. He has been involved in a few internet startups including a digital route planner for a triple A affiliate. His advice to vendors and users alike? "Think of benefits, not features."