Webinar Recap: Top Marketing Trends Impacting Your Business in 2022

In the webinar, Milestone President Benu Aggarwal and VP of Marketing Erik Newton shared their thoughts on the fastest-moving digital trends going into the new year. 

Key topics in this recap video:

• The rise of digital commerce, entity & semantic search, engagement connectivity, and digital desire
• The better-me trend and growth in search queries
• Biggest search trends for 2022, MUM, and Google Lens image search, image shopping
• Stitching omnichannel experiences and addressing the digital desire
• Agility and opportunity in your martech stack and your CMS
• Key elements of 2022 omnichannel marketing plan – images, video, technical SEO, AI, voice, messaging, intent/entity-driven content, and more
• Community and doing the right thing and driving growth

If you want to discuss any of these trends, contact your CSM or sales@milestoneineternet.com

You can download the deck and watch the video.

Here are some highlights from the webinar:

Why MUM algorithm is important
Google’s latest algo MUM tries to understand the deeper meaning and context of the queries. For example, shopping is going to happen through your images, and people might not even come to your domain. They will just look at snap it and the transaction will happen. And it’s will happen across all types of searches. What it means is when brands are thinking about images, make sure your images are relevant, high quality, and have all the schema attributes.

Local search needs to focus on engagement
Local search is in fact becoming more relevant, it used to be about the consistency of information, which we used to call NAP (Name, address, and phone number). From NAP it is now moving to EAT; expertise, authority, and trust, and beyond that starting to focus more on enhancing experiences. Your business can leverage engagement and connectivity.  How are you engaging with your consumer, especially today when all of us are working in a hybrid environment juggling between online to offline. There are tools and features that search engines have launched to enhance engagement from messaging, FAQs to Google posts, there are a lot of opportunities for a business to be present where the customers are interacting with your brand.

Need for speed
Google is going to double down on page speed and page experience, it plans to keep releasing updates to improve speed algorithm both for mobile and desktop users. So the key is to make sure anything you do and any digital asset you create, you are thinking about it loaded for the user on a device of choice, even when doing a CRO conversion experiment, thinking through these various elements of page experience will be critical because today’s consumer is sensitive and may abandon your website to go to a competitor’s site if your site is not well optimized

Using first-party data
There is so much more you can do with first-party data because you have already gained permission from that customer. And that’s what our recommendation is. If you’re creating an asset, think about that asset holistically, think about everything, which you need to do before those assets are created and every single channel that asset is going to be delivered on. We can show you how you can scale this across multiple channels and touchpoints,

Mobile interactions are key to user experience
Desktop is important, but mobile is more important. We used to do long menus, long scroll-down menus on mobile, but now we have started reducing the long menu and started making sure that these menus are easily clickable, you can convert, and you can have much better interaction. And then moving from user experience to layout and content, is it optimized for what customer is looking for and gives the best result for their search. How your site is structured, how your conversion features are structured, how your overall features are functioning are incredibly important.

Full funnel view of your marketing
Think about the entire funnel and let’s make sure every single touchpoint is consistent, is all stitched together to probe a wide holistic experience, whether it’s the FAQ, connect with your customer across all the channels, or PWA and you are sending them SMS or push notification, or you are chatting with your customer or sending them messaging across all your social channels, or, Google messaging, Facebook messaging.

Learn more from the full webinar and the slides.

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