Performance Marketing Tech and Trends: Q3 2022

Marketing in 2022 requires marketers to distinguish impactful opportunities from the challenging disruptors. But, how’s a marketer to know which opportunity will drive the most success for their brand? Our experts outlined the top five digital marketing trends from Q3 2022, and the strategies marketers can implement to elevate their brand’s success moving forward.

1. Helpful, valued experiences are key

Google strikes again with its latest helpful content algorithm update. This algorithm update gives consumers what they have been begging for — helpful content! The goal of the update is to reward content that has been created to assist users and downgrade content that has been produced with the sole intent of ranking highly in search. However, this Google update is not the only push for more customer-centric practices. This can be seen across the marketing landscape. Consumers are demanding that brands shift from creating content for ranking goals to creating content that is truly helpful for them. When it comes to media messaging, social presence — even measurement strategies — marketers must align their tactics with the customer journey and create valued experiences for the customer to drive success for their brands.

How can marketers ensure their content is creating helpful and valued experiences for consumers?

Take the time to know your customer’s pain points, purchase journey, and pressing questions
Create a roadmap for content updates throughout your ecosystem (site, social channels, media messaging)
Highlight the value customers will find with your brand, without over-engineering to appease algorithms

2. Ad-supported Netflix

After 15 years operating ad-free, Netflix has announced that in November 2022, the company will begin offering an ad-supported plan for its subscribers. After losing one million subscribers, Netflix knew that expanding into ad-supported offerings would be a crucial step in turning the tables and driving success. But, how does this impact marketers? Well, this opportunity creates yet another streaming service for digital marketers to consider for their video approach. However, given its high costs ($60CPM; $10MM campaign minimum spend), limited targeting (genre & country only), low subscriber forecast (500k by end of 2022), and little-to-no measurement, Netflix’s offering falls extremely short of its already established competitors.

How can marketers leverage the new ad-supported Netflix?

Hang tight — marketers should keep their media investments with well-established demand side platforms (DSPs) and ad-supported streaming services that can offer scale, a range of targeting options, and advanced measurement to ensure media effectiveness until Netflix improves its platform to meet the expectations of today’s data-driven marketers

3. Growing importance of video on social

TikTok continues to disrupt today’s marketing landscape. The latest? In response to the rapid growth of the TikTok platform, Meta is adjusting its strategic direction to become a video-first discovery engine to increase its own in-app usage on Facebook and Instagram and grow the share of time spent on social platforms. This comes as no surprise as video has continued to grow in importance on social media. In fact, consumers spend, on average, 84 minutes a day consuming video content and 66% of consumers have watched video content (i.e., product demos, reviews, FAQs, unboxings, etc.) to learn about a brand or product. Meta hopes to capture this momentum that consumers are showing for video by focusing on creating a more discovery-focused environment within their apps and encouraging brands and users to share more engaging video content.

How can marketers leverage video within their marketing plans?

Crafting thoughtful content strategies — both paid and organic — centered around engaging videos (with an extra focus on mobile-friendly videos) will be crucial
Content should be created with an awareness and education objective, offering value to prospects and existing customers who view posts from the brand

4. Benchmarking in an unbenchmarkable era

With the pandemic continuing to propel many changes within consumer behavior, marketers continue to scramble to find a benchmark metric to compare performance data against. Needless to say, marketers are operating in an unbenchmarkable era. This can be seen clearly in the costs of goods. Costs of goods have become wildly skewed since the pandemic. From 2012–2019, the annual percent increase year over year was anywhere from 0%–3%. From 2019 to 2020, this jumped to 5%. From 2021 to 2022, the increase fell back down to 3.3%. The current marketing landscape is truly unpredictable with the current disruptions.

In many ways, marketers are starting from scratch, being relegated to performance comparisons over shorter timeframes and setting new benchmarks for performance comparison going forward. Said another way, there has not been an extended period of consistency for consumer behavior, which is leading to new approaches being adopted by marketers.

How can marketers compare results in an unbenchmarkable era?

Create safer and fairer benchmark alternatives by looking over shorter periods of time for cost-based metrics. For digital advertisers, an option would be to put more equity into metrics defining rate of efficiency (CTR, CVR) to paint a better picture of how frequently people are engaging with your ads or brand properties rather than focusing on the cost required to do so
Adjust goals to account for cost increases. Setting similar or more efficient cost-per-outcome goals against previous years will likely set the campaign up for “failure” at the outset, at no fault to campaign performance

5. Lasting impact of midterm election media spend

Election season has started and the yard signs are in the ground; the midterm elections are coming. People across the country know what to expect — a seemingly endless stream of political ads. Early ad spend trends indicate that this midterm will break records with spending expected to hit $9.67 billion, the highest total ever for any political ad cycle (including presidential elections).

Beyond higher spend, there is expected to be more diversity in where ads run, with 15% of ads being run on connected TV, and popular platforms like TikTok preparing updated policies to ensure political ads don’t disrupt the user experience. Regardless, this midterm season is expected to produce record-high ad spend with expanded media channel presence, paired with the ever-present diminishing consumer attention span for this content.

How can marketers drive success this midterm election season?

Carefully consider timing and channel selection. This may be a time to stay out of or pull back the hardest-hit channels like TV
Double check that all messaging is appropriate given big issues at hand
Consider messaging that addresses the political climate in order to be more memorable or relevant

So… now what?

Today’s marketing landscape continues to throw new challenges and opportunities for brands to navigate. To be successful, marketers should consider the key strategies outlined above to take advantage of identified trends. Explore one trend and recommended strategy that makes sense for your business and goals to set your brand up for success. And if you have any questions, we would love to chat with you! Contact us at info@collectivemeasures.com.