In this five-part series, we are taking a look at the 2022 social trends from Hootsuite. The final macro trend for 2022 is the customer care trend.
The Customer Care Trend
Social marketers rescue their brands from the customer service apocalypse
Spurred on by lockdowns and chaotic shifts in business operations, we’ve seen social marketers take on more responsibility for managing an influx of customer service inquiries.
Social has become the front line of this crisis
Consumers, fed up with waiting on hold, have discovered that service delivered via social is immediate, convenient, and effective. In a Nielsen survey commissioned by Facebook, 64% of people said they now prefer to message rather than call a business. The pressure on businesses to adapt to as many digital customer service channels as possible is sky high.
According to Gartner, 60% of all customer service requests will be managed via digital channels by 2023. Consumer expectations are mounting. Demand for integrating customer care channels is increasing—and social is where that pressure is peaking.
Most organizations are not ready to deliver customer care on social.
Despite a rise in demand, many organizations aren’t well positioned to deliver effective customer care over social media…at least not yet. Our internal data from research conducted in July 2021 tells us that 71% of organizations have either not started investing in social customer care yet, or they don’t plan to invest in it at all.
In 2022, business leaders will look to social marketers to take a greater role in customer care. Pioneering social marketers will break from their departmental silos to build deeper inroads with customer service teams and take more agency in delivering customer care.
What do you think about these five trends and where does Social Media rank in your marketing priorities for 2022?
Influencers are becoming increasingly popular among consumer brands, but have you thought about it for B2T (business-to-trades) companies? Join Matt Sonnhalter as he discusses the questions you should ask yourself before starting an influencer program. He outlines three things to consider – social media, products that are conducive to good influencer content and an e-commerce presence.
To view other videos from Sonnhalter, visit our YouTube channel here and let us know if there’s a B2T marketing topic you’d like us to cover.
In this five-part series, we are taking a look at the 2022 social trends from Hootsuite. The fourth macro trend for 2022 is the social commerce trend.
The Social Commerce Trend
Social becomes the heart of the post-pandemic shopping experience
Lockdowns shot ecommerce forward a decade—in three months.
That all changed overnight when consumers went into lockdown and many looked to meet basic needs by buying online.
Suddenly, 84% of consumers were shopping over the internet, according to Shopify. eMarketer reported a surge in ecommerce sales growth to 18%, the highest increase the firm had ever reported for this figure. And in what McKinsey dubbed “the quickening,” ecommerce penetration rocketed ahead more in the first 90 days of the pandemic than it had in the previous decade.
This “temporary” boom in online shopping isn’t stopping
Nearly two years since the beginning of the pandemic, this shift in consumer spending has shown no signs of slowing down. And with eMarketer projecting that double-digit annual growth will drive ecommerce sales from $792 billion in 2020 to $1.6 trillion in 2025, it’s clear that our new ecommerce habits aren’t just here to stay—they’re very much on the rise.
This growth is particularly acute when it comes to social commerce. According to Hootsuite and We Are Social’s Digital 2021 report, the global social commerce industry is currently worth more than half a trillion US dollars. Simon Kemp, founder of strategic marketing consultancy Kepios, expects that number to grow.
And it’s not just discovery that gives social commerce its business utility. Buyers are using social media to search, research and evaluate the brands they buy from, making social networks the second-most important channel for online brand research after search engines. What’s more, if we look at people aged 16 to 24, social networks actually rank even higher than search engines like Google when it comes to brand research.
While the brick-and-mortar storefront lives on post-pandemic, it’s become clear that social commerce is an opportunity businesses can’t afford to miss. Small businesses in 2022 will work to extend the experience customers have with their brands across social storefronts and real life, while global enterprises test the limits of the online shopping experience.
Younger generations now turn to social networks to research brands more than search engines.
Search engines: 51.3%
Social networks: 53.2%
Percentage of global internet users aged 16-24 who use each channel as a primary source of information when researching brands. Source: Hootsuite and We Are Social, Digital 202119
In this five-part series, we are taking a look at the 2022 social trends from Hootsuite. The third macro trend for 2022 is the ROI trend.
The ROI Trend
Social quietly matures out of the marketing department
Respondents in our 2022 Social Trends survey—particularly larger businesses—indicated that they have become more confident in quantifying the return on investment (ROI) of their social media practices. The majority of marketers (83%) report that they are either somewhat, very, or extremely confident in quantifying the ROI of their social efforts, up from 68% last year.
What can you learn from marketers who said they’re “extremely confident” in measuring the ROI of social media?
1) Social media has a priming effect on the rest of your marketing. 55% say their social ads strategy is completely integrated with other marketing activities. Meaning these marketers know that social works in conjunction with other marketing efforts to drive awareness and help with brand recall.
2) Social can help you gain valuable customer insights. 48% strongly agree that social listening has increased in value for their organization. Meaning these marketers are using social to learn more about what their customers want and need so that they can deliver exactly that.
3) Social is at its most powerful when paid and organic work together. 65% have completely integrated their paid and organic social media efforts. Meaning these marketers understand how to strategically use both to attract new customers while deepening relationships with existing ones.
Bold businesses in 2022 will buff up their employee advocacy programs, get better at using social to gather consumer insights, and strive to deliver the kind of impact they’ve seen social have on their marketing elsewhere in their organizations.
In this five-part series, we are taking a look at the 2022 social trends from Hootsuite. The second macro trend for 2022 is the social advertising trend.
The Social Advertising Trend
Marketers get creative as consumers wise up to social ads
But another more likely reason—and a bigger takeaway for marketers when it comes to advertising anywhere on social—is the fact that these networks encourage advertisers to make content that fits organically into the platforms.
Brands that advertise successfully on these networks understand that audience mindset is key. Simply put, no one wants their experience on any social network interrupted by ads from brands that are as boring as they are self-
Consumers, wise to the sameness of social advertising, are holding brands to a higher standard when it comes to creativity—but they’re also rewarding those that get it right. Brands that want to stand out in 2022 will have to work harder to create ads that mirror and enrich the distinct experience offered by each social network.
Despite historically low budgets, marketers are spending more on social ads
This year, marketing budgets relative to revenue are the lowest they have ever been, according to Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey. However, more than half (51.4%) of the marketers that we surveyed said they plan to increase their paid social spend in 2022.
Where do they plan to spend that money? Last year, most of the marketers we spoke to disproportionately pointed at Instagram. This year, investment in Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn has caught up.
The largest increases in spend relative to last year are going toward TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat. Marketers are shifting their resources to where they can make the most impact—and, increasingly, that’s on networks that typically haven’t been a priority in the social marketing channel mix.
For many digital marketers, the ongoing pandemic acted as an accelerant for digitization. Most famously embraced by the World Economic Forum, this view holds that it didn’t disrupt per se; it pushed forward. Content marketers across industries, seeing increasingly fragmented customer journeys, agreed – and ones in the manufacturing industry corroborated it. As customers exhibited online event fatigue, they too needed to face this change along with the industry’s inherent ones. However, content marketing ideas for manufacturing companies don’t come easily in such a demanding market, let alone effective ones.
Content marketing challenges for manufacturing companies
As an introductory note, here we may first highlight said challenges. The manufacturing industry does face distinct ones of its own, which inexperienced or broader-scope content marketers may miss or underestimate. In turn, it becomes nigh impossible to produce effective content for it, let alone beat the competition with it.
To consolidate them, the primary ones include:
Offer complexity. A manufacturing company typically does not sell simple products accessible to a wide market. Framing such specialized offers properly for their niche audiences requires considerable industry expertise.
Decision-makers’ scrutiny. Moreover, manufacturing content marketers need to entice decision-makers who seek expertise and offer tangible value. As with B2C marketing, eliciting emotional responses will very rarely bear results with this audience.
A less visually exciting industry. Finally, the manufacturing industry offers comparatively fewer thrills for compelling visual content to thrive on. This has been changing in recent years, however.
In addition, the typical customer’s purchase decision process spans a much longer journey. Strategyn breaks down the individual steps into 6; need, research, design, evaluation, shortlist, and purchase.
A chart of the industrial buyer’s buying process by Strategyn.
Evidently, then, content marketers cannot afford to overlook this unique set of factors. The industrial buyer is cautious and knowledgeable, and requires stage-specific content across the buyer journey to court effectively.
For that matter, Content Marketing Institute offers some notable insights. It finds that half (49%) of manufacturing marketers rate their company’s efforts as “moderately successful,” and only 18% rate them as more successful than that. Among what they often lack, they find, are:
Prioritizing optimal content delivery times
Crafting stage-specific content
Using storytelling in their content
It is these factors that content marketers may need to address, alongside picking the optimal marketing mediums and channels. (more…)
