HubSpot just published a new study serving over a thousand marketing professionals across B2B and B2C on the top marketing trends that they leverage, the strategies they’re using, and the top challenges that they’re facing. And here are the seven key takeaways that you need to know about this report.
Number one, we have the top marketing trends that marketing leaders are following right now. There’s short form video, which is a direct response to our shortening attention span. People are on their phones, they’re on the go, so good content these days are shorts, concise, precise, and impactful. Second one we have here is experiential marketing.
Experiential marketing is also sometimes called engagement marketing or interactive marketing. It’s where you actually engage your audience to participate in the marketing itself, maybe through contest or submission of user generated content. Creating memorable experiences and emotional connection through participation.
Third on this list is influencer marketing. As social media and the digital landscape becomes more of a community influencer. Marketing is how marketing leaders are leveraging existing key figures in the industry and the voice of experts and thought leaders to be able to bring that back to their brand.
Second key insight is which of the following are your. Primary marketing strategies. We’ve got 24 percents in content marketing, 23% in co-marketing, and 32% in social media and marketing. So content marketing is a big one. It’s always a key winner when it comes to raising brand awareness, producing content that allows you to establish your brand as a key thought leader in the space.
We’ve got co-marketing at 23%, which is collaborating with other brands who also have respect and authority in their spaces, maybe an adjacent space working together. On your content strategies, uh, and then 32% on social media marketing, participating in those conversations, distributing your content through a casual and social context.
Their key takeaway here, 48% of director level and above marketers say that their primary goal for running marketing campaigns in 2022 is increasing brand awareness. And I think that’s actually a major. Over the past couple of years is marketing is often very, very concerned where the primary goal is around engagement and conversions.
But over time, as the digital landscape became more fragmented, thought leadership played a bigger role. We’ve all come to realize that it’s really hard to track this stuff. Customers go through many, many touchpoints before making a purchasing decision. So more than. Brand awareness is so important. Just making sure that you’re everywhere all the time so that when customers actually engage with your brand, they’re already familiar.
They already have trusts, and a relationship builds through the content that you put out there and the reputation that you have in the market. The fourth key takeaway, we have 51% of director level marketers and above see that their marketing budgets will increase in 2022. A lot of marketing budgets were cut during the Covid 19 pandemic, but things are opening back up again.
Marketing budgets are on the rise. Not only that, we’re not gonna go back to the same. A lot of companies have really developed a new digital strategy during lockdown, moving away from physical events and conferences. So now we’re gonna get to see where these new marketing budgets are gonna go. Number five, we have the top social network that marketers are leveraging right now, and the findings are pointing to YouTube.
YouTube is the most leveraged social media platform that marketing leaders are looking. Lots of interesting theories for that, but YouTube is really a place where people continue to go to search and go to learn, and it’s a great place to publish thought leadership content. The content there tends to be a bit more informative and educational as opposed to a platform more like TikTok, where there’s a lot of noise and a lot of entertainment there.
So that could be one of the reasons why YouTube is this rising star in the world of social. Item number six, we have 83% of director level marketers and above leverage content marketing in their roles, followed by social media and email marketing. So this is the specific marketing leaders. What’s taking up your day to day?
So we’re seeing content marketing in the lead, which is of no. Prize content marketing continues to dominate in 2022. We’re seeing also a lot of time being spent in social media. Again, a great platform for distributing that content. It’s the place where you, uh, can actually share and show off all of this good stuff that your marketing team’s producing.
And then followed by email marketing, which is still a nice and reliable way to be able to reach people. Social media can be very noisy, but if you have a direct relationship with a customer email inbox, that’s still the most reliable way of getting that click rate and getting that open. Right. Last but not least, what are the top challenges marketers are facing right now?
26% say it’s creating engaging content. 25% say reaching the target audience and 25% saying tying social activities to business outcomes. These are such classic challenges. My tip for being able to create engaging content is really spend time talking to your customers, understanding what their problems are, and creating content as answers to those burning questions that your customers are asking day after day.
It should be a two-way conversation on the topic of reaching target audiences. That also comes back down to customer discovery. Understanding where your customers are spending their time is really important. Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on YouTube? Where do they get. Your customers are also learning about their jobs day after day, so understanding where they learn is gonna help you reach them so much.
Last, but not least, of course, tying social activities to business outcomes has always been a great challenge. It’s gonna become even more challenging as there are more touchpoints, more social channels, more of these networks. Knowing how to calculate these things might actually become less important.
What you want is to be able to maximize your number of touchpoints and maybe even worry less about the. Grant awareness, after all, is one of the key trends in marketing right now, and there you have it. Those are my seven key takeaways from the new HubSpot study on the top marketing trends and challenges from marketing leaders.
Hopefully, you’ll learn a thing or two. If there’s other topics that you want me to dive into, please leave it in the comments below and I’ll see you in the next video.
