When it comes to predicting marketing trends, there is no better group to ask than the experts on Lev's Marketing Strategy and Services team. This group is constantly bringing innovative solutions to Lev customers with marketing and technology solutions. Below are their predictions for Creative + Brand, Email Marketing, Digital Marketing + SEO, and Paid Media.
 

Creative + Brand 

Advanced personalization will be a huge focus for many brands. Expect to see creative and thoughtful engagement campaigns (i.e. Spotify year in review) developed across all industries.
-Jenna Kienle, Director, Marketing Strategy & Services
 

Additionally, we’ll continue to see creative ways of bringing outside disciplines, media, and concepts being applied to visual creative ideas that will enhance personalization. A great example is the Aura portion of the Spotify year in review: moods are associated with colors and are associated with types of music to produce sounds as a creative visual — seriously, how cool is that?
-Jess Endl, Manager, Creative Services
 

Collaborations have been on the rise; we should expect this to not only to continue but to surprise us in exciting new ways. Traditional media working its way into digital media — digital screens popping up in the middle of a city street, music mashing up into an art piece or animated short, .abstract paintings on a dress coming down the runway, the possibilities are truly endless.
-Jess Endl, Manager, Creative Services
 

Email Marketing 

Accessibility. Dark mode is catching on to reduce eye strain, and it’s just one of many ways to make your content more accessible. Testing with larger fonts and simple layouts are great ways to improve accessibility. Also considering language preferences will be an important focus this coming year.
-Cristen Solon, Associate Principal, Marketing Consultant

Interactive Emails. Interactive email tools are more available than ever (and work better than ever). Turn passive readers into engaged customers by embedding forms directly in the email to collect preferences, conduct surveys and polls, and delight with gamification. Use the data collected for personalizing future emails.
-Cristen Solon, Associate Principal, Marketing Consultant
 

Shorter emails. Our time is valuable and people typically scan emails anyway. Writing and sending emails with shorter copy is a trend that will continue to grow.
-Angela Ely, Senior Marketing Consultant
 

Using AI to analyze behavioral data and identify trends quickly will help email marketers optimize content; from subject lines, offers, sending time and CTA text. AI can perform these tasks quicker to optimize campaigns in real time.
-Angela Ely, Senior Marketing Consultant
 

Rethinking what email engagement truly means and developing new metrics to measure engagement. 
-Susan Prater, Principal Marketing Consultant, Manager Market Strategy & Solutions
 

Developing a Zero Party data strategy to create hyper relevant emails.
-Susan Prater, Principal Marketing Consultant, Manager Market Strategy & Solutions
 

Digital Marketing + SEO

Cross-channel personalization will continue to be a must have for marketers. Though, I expect that we’ll see a shift in how marketers make this a priority within their business. Less focus on preference centers and data collection and more focus on MarTech, including consolidation and utilization of the data they already have.
-Laura Scholke, Principal Marketing Consultant 
 

As more people use their mobile devices to run their businesses and their lives, marketers will need to think about how they tell their stories cohesively across touchpoints, with a focus on mobile delivery. Visitors will demand high-quality, trustworthy content delivered quickly and in a range of formats, from articles to videos to podcasts. Businesses that get this right will be rewarded in the organic search results.
-Andrea Connelly, Strategic Marketing Consultant

All of Google’s organic search technologies are laser focused on understanding what the searcher is looking for and then delivering the most relevant results quickly and reliably. Marketers should follow suit. SEO work should focus on solving for the searcher instead of solving for Google. When you figure out what your searchers are looking for and then deliver the best content you can, you solve for Google.
-Andrea Connelly, Strategic Marketing Consultant

Paid Media 

Advertisers are going to continue to harness the power of first party data. With the recent Apple iOS update and Google Chrome entering a cookieless world sometime in 2022, reliance on third party will continue to decline. Leveraging tools like Ad Studio and LiveRamp can seamlessly integrate your first party data into advertising channels in near real time.
-Bethany Andrew, Manager Paid Media & Analytics 
 

It’s a double edged sword. Customers want more privacy but they also want to be marketed to in a personalized manner. Marketers need to find ways to balance the two and speak appropriately to customers. If a customer has provided signals to a brand that they are interested in a particular product or service, they expect to receive advertisements specific to those products. Leveraging audience segmentation using first party data will deliver these results. 
-Bethany Andrew, Manager Paid Media & Analytics 

See something you want to try in 2022? Contact us, and we will help you make it a reality.