As year quickly draws to start and end, but the time to rethink your marketing strategy remains ever evolving. Your goal should be to step into the New Year with a sound marketing plan in mind, with all the tactics and steps carefully laid out for your team to execute at a moment’s notice. Deadlines, new marketing materials, goals and objectives, all of these should be ready for your marketers to use in the new year. That said, you can’t hope to take your digital marketing forward or create a campaign on a tight budget if you don’t start this process right now.

It’s important to get a head start and act on the upcoming trends and forecasts beforehand so that you can gain a distinct advantage over your competitors in the early months of the year – which we all know can make all the difference. To that end, let’s take a look at the five best ways you can take your digital marketing forward in the following year.

1. Rethink and optimize your email digital marketing strategy

While everyone is looking for the next shortcut to digital superstardom, you should be capitalizing on the tried and tested marketing methods that never fail to deliver results. One of these is, of course, email marketing, and there are several ways you can take your email strategy to the next level in 2022. Given the fact that email marketing is always on the rise and that 80% of marketers have reported an increase in email engagement in 2020, you can appreciate the need to invest more in your own email marketing.

You can start by reworking the look and format of your emails. Use more visual elements and employ your designers to craft complementary visuals to make your emails stand out when opened. Rework your subject lines as well, and restructure the email copy to leverage headings, bullet points, and clear CTAs. Make sure that your personalization is on point and if you haven’t done this before, make sure to use email automation to reach out to the customers who have opted out of your website before finishing a purchase.

2. Be more active on social media for digital marketing

We live in a social media driven world, so it’s only natural that your SM presence should increase in 2022 and the years to come. However, modern social media strategies don’t require you to waste resources on every social media network out there. Instead, a winning SM strategy for 2022 will have you boost your presence on specific networks that are relevant to your business, your industry, and your online audience.

If it just so happens that this includes every popular social media network, then so be it. But for the most part, your company will always have a niche audience that hangs out at very specific places in the online world. Make sure to streamline your social media investment by finding out where your audience is, when they’re online, and how they consume social media content to make your SM strategy as detailed and effective as possible.

3. Double-down on your content marketing strategy

In 2022 and the years to come, content marketing will remain one of the most important and lucrative marketing tools for businesses of all sizes. Simply put, there is no digital marketing without content creation, and you have to make sure that your content strategy is ready for the New Year.

If you take a look at how an experienced team at a popular digital marketing agency operates, you’ll quickly notice that they focus heavily on creating informative, long-form content that appeals to search engines as well as online audiences. That said, it’s important to note that digital agencies also focus heavily on content diversification, meaning that they craft various types of content, including videos, images, infographics, and more in order to appeal to every type of online customer.

With that in mind, be sure to craft new content, rework and optimize your old pieces, and start producing other content types to engage your audience in 2022.

4. Build an omni-channel communication approach

Communication has become an integral part of modern digital marketing, as there is nothing that can spread the word of your brand and generate quality leads like effective brand-consumer communication across a variety of touchpoints. Now, given the fact that there are many touchpoints, you need to prepare an omni-channel communication strategy for the following year.

This means that you need to identify all communication channels with customers and equip your support, marketing, and sales staff to handle them. Make sure to leverage real-time communication to better market your business online and enhance the customers’ experience to drive sales and growth.

5. Optimize for voice search

Last but not least, don’t forget to optimize your entire digital presence for voice search. Given the fact that voice search has risen in popularity tremendously in recent years, and that 71% percent of consumers prefer to conduct queries by voice instead of typing, that means that you need to optimize your content for voice search to rank higher in 2021.

You can create new content and rework old pieces with this in mind, making sure to integrate question-based keywords and restructure the content to make it easy to appear at the top of search results. Ideally, you want your content to address a specific question and appear in Google’s snippets, which will invariably improve CTR and almost every other metric related to search your site’s ranking.

Wrapping up

Digital marketing continues to be the main driving force behind business success, so come 2022, you want to have a strong marketing strategy at the ready. Invest in these tactics right now, and you should have no problem taking your marketing and your entire business forward in the New Year.

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