10 growth marketing experts share their 2022 predictions and New Year’s resolutions

This is a quiet period for marketing: End-of-year campaigns are already underway, teams are on holiday vacations and there’s little to do until after the new year.

Setting aside the holiday spirit, this has been a difficult year for growth professionals. Most are still adapting to pandemic-driven changes to consumer habits, but Apple’s new privacy options and the impending death of the browser cookie are making it more difficult to reach the right consumers. Growth marketers have a wide variety of tools available, but which ones do the pros use?

We reached out to 10 growth marketing experts to find how they were preparing for 2022 and to ask they had any New Year’s resolutions to share.

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The answers and advice we received were as varied as the people we polled, but nearly all of them indicated that learning — e.g., analytics training, getting started with AI tools, etc. — was high on their to-do list. “Google Analytics 4 is the new default in 2022 and beyond, so get ready to relearn how to configure your analytics reporting in a way that makes sense for your organization,” said Richard Meyer of Tuff.

Kate Adams, SVP of marketing at Validity, said it’s important to keep honing one’s skills, but growth marketers shouldn’t feel compelled to become experts at everything: “Overall, there’s more value in being able to articulate what your problems are and develop strategies to fix them than to be a technology savant gobbling up whatever solution you can get your hands on.”

Our questions also addressed the future of influencer marketing, which automation tools they’re working with and recommending to clients and whether they’re continuing to invest in short-form videos.

Here’s the full list of who we spoke to:

Jonathan Martinez, founder, JMStrategy

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

In 2022, the companies that come out on top will be those that unlock iOS 14 and leverage influencers. My goal is to continue testing everything on iOS 14, such as optimal account structures, bidding, flows and more. I’m really interested to see how channels/MMPs/etc. evolve and what types of measurement betas they all roll out.

Equally as important to me is to continue leveraging the power of influencers. I think we’re still less than 10% of the way there on how impactful influencers will be in the next decade. Utilizing TikTok’s creator marketplace, platforms such as Billo for UGC content, etc., are all tactics that I’ll be employing.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

While influencer marketing may have been discussed in magnitudes over the last year, I believe we’re still at the infancy of this tactic. We’ll see channels start to create influencer marketplaces (akin to TikTok’s creator marketplace), which will remove barriers to working with influencers. The pandemic has accelerated people watching even more content from influencers on various channels. These same people are becoming more responsive to ads from a personal voice and increasingly numb to typical brand ads.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

As growth marketers, we should always be on the hunt for tools that’ll either help solve monotonous tasks or increase our analysis throughput. The creative AI space is something I’m keeping a close eye on because I think this is where there’s huge room for advancement. As targeting and bidding become increasingly channel automated, creative is an area that I believe still needs the human touch. If AI platforms can help speed learnings and provide useful insights on creative launches, it’ll be immensely helpful.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

Growth marketing has always been a nice blend of analytics + creativity, with distribution being dependent on the stage of the company. As data becomes less clear with industrywide privacy changes, growth marketers are being forced to be more analytical and technical than ever. Running incrementality tests, applying scalars to channels and validating data across tools will be paramount in 2022 to understanding growth efforts.

Kate Adams, SVP of marketing, Validity

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

In 2022 marketers can expect to see a resurgence of product-led growth models, which have historically centered on creating free products that are appealing, easy to use and accessible. For so long, we’ve held this notion that growth models have to incorporate a trial period to succeed with consumers. What if that wasn’t the case? With the convergence of product-led growth strategies and the elimination of friction, it doesn’t have to be.

This year, marketers should resolve to embrace this resurgence, but in a modern, differentiated way. Let’s rethink how we approach growth models; maybe we don’t have to include a trial or free version of our products — especially when not every company is able to sustain the investment and resources required for trial products.

Another resolution is to not let yourselves fall in the trap of believing that everything is back to normal — COVID is still disrupting in-person events as well as entire industries and will continue to do so. So as marketers we have to resolve to pivot early and often to ensure our larger campaigns and investments are able to succeed regardless of the status of the pandemic.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

Influencers have their time and place — we all saw the “Just Like That” Peloton ad and that was cool and will stay with us for a week, maybe a month. But the reality is that no matter how much you pay or what influencer your brand snags, these are passing moments in time.

As a B2B marketer, I’m much more interested in making customers part of a community and giving them a platform to share their success stories of which we play a part. Instead of going for one person with 10 million followers via a flashy influencer program, why not invite 1,000 people with 10,000 followers to talk about your product? Not every industry has a Kim Kardashian for the moment, and even if they do, it’s not a sustainable model. It’s much more impactful, especially in the B2B world, to have a steady, ongoing drumbeat of customers telling their stories about your brand than investing heavily in one mega influencer.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Video definitely hasn’t peaked — and I don’t believe it will any time soon. There is an entire generation of individuals who essentially grew up on YouTube and TikTok. They know how to get to what they want (information included) faster. These are all the same people that are joining the workforce and suddenly becoming B2B buyers and, if you want to be successful, you have to communicate with them in the way they’re most familiar with. Short-form video content is one big way to do that.

There’s so much more room for video. In our industry, webinars still reign supreme but stopping there is antiquated thinking. Marketing teams should be challenging themselves to come up with ways to address the webinar fatigue happening in really technical industries. For example, taking long-form content (like webinars) and cutting them up into smaller, more readily consumable snippets is a quick and easy way to ensure these learnings live on and reach a broader audience.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

AI is some of the most exciting technology I’ve seen in a really long time. The fact that AI can achieve any number of tasks — whether it’s improving user experience or actually having a conversation with somebody — is truly incredible. But, I think of these things as pendulums. Consumers may experience AI and think, “I just want to talk to a person.” While using AI to mitigate issues with user experience and have it dealt with automatically is an ideal solution, there are instances when you actually need to enable a human being and have a human conversation.

AI is like a house; without the appropriate technology and engineering infrastructure at the foundation, that house is going to crumble. AI is only as good as what you put into it. The minute you try to train your machine based on bad data, it will find faulty trends or just not work at all. Right now too many people are running toward AI as the solution for all their problems without solving for the data decay already taking place in their organization.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

Too many marketers today are enacting tokenization and claiming that as personalization. They’ll put your name and your company name in their materials and think, “I put these tokens in, and therefore I delivered you a personalized experience.” That’s missing the forest for the trees. From a technology perspective, it’s about the website experiences. We need to deliver a personalized experience based on who you are, how many times you’ve been here and what we know about you.

In terms of tools, I think there’s a ton of folks out there doing really interesting stuff right now — for everything from content personalization to web personalization. The important piece here is the ability to test and understand the impact of your personalization efforts on customers. A lot of ESPs and companies like Adobe are doing an incredible job building out tools to enable marketers to really hone in on the customer journey and demonstrate what the next best action is for each customer. I’m incredibly biased but I also think our solutions Everest and Demandtools can go a long way in providing today’s marketers with the ability to take their campaigns to the next level in terms of personalization and accuracy.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

Marketing is incredibly difficult; more so than ever before. And there are also more solutions (8,000+ in fact) that claim to be the silver bullet to fix any marketing woes. But those are just claims as often no one solution is the end-all-be-all. While you definitely have to be savvy in technology (and the implementation of that technology) to be a successful marketer, there are many considerations in a marketer’s skillset outside of this technical piece.

For instance, there’s a marketing technologist, a marketing strategist, the marketing execution piece — in today’s market, you have to be all three of those to be a really strong marketer. Mastering all of these skills is difficult for one person, especially because it’s using both sides of the brain. Understanding the analytical aspects of a marketing program, but also how to write the copy that captures people’s attention and portrays the message you want to say is tricky. Overall, there’s more value in being able to articulate what your problems are and develop strategies to fix them, than to be a technology savant gobbling up whatever solution you can get your hands on.

Richard Meyer, growth marketer, Tuff

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

In 2022, I want to commit to:

  • Taking additional training courses on the new Google Analytics tool, Google Analytics 4.
  • Developing additional attribution reporting cadences that rely on first-touch attribution, instead of Google Analytic’s default “last-click” attribution.
  • Developing additional demand-generating strategies (instead of demand-capturing strategies) for niche-product and service markets, such as fintech, B2B SaaS, etc.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

Influencer marketing is an effective way to create a content creation pipeline for many e-commerce platforms. As advertising costs continue to increase on social media platforms, influencers can be a cost-effective way to build an aware audience of your product.

However, not all influencers are created the same. There are a lot of influencers who may have large social media followings but aren’t effective as content creators for brands. It’s important to look at engagement rate, the types of promotions they’ve done before and what their audience size and reach is when considering hiring an influencer.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Short-form videos will continue to be a staple of the advertising content mix moving forward. As the demand for video consumption continues to increase, organizations are having to fit their message in shorter and shorter formats.

Organizations that are successfully able to communicate their value propositions to their target audience in 15 seconds or less (the length of a pre-roll YouTube ad or in-stream Facebook ad) have a distinct advantage when it comes to increasing their brand awareness.

Anything over 60 seconds is now considered long form, and while these pieces are usually great for brands, they aren’t as effective in getting the word out, simply because users have the ability to skip 75%+ of the video if they are used in pre-roll or in-stream formats.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

AI Marketing, and more importantly, machine learning will be an important part of helping advertisers reach new audiences, especially in the age of iOS 14.5. Companies such as Black Crow are exciting, innovative and ideal partners for scaleups.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

Personalization is highly effective when used correctly. Personalization does get overwhelming whenever a user is flooded with too many pop-ups and experiences.

However, personalization can be as simple as adding a snippet of code to your email newsletter so their email includes their name in the body text. These are shown to be effective.

A favorite use of personalization is using a customer’s recently browsed products to create affinity groups of “recommended for you” to be used in an upsell capacity. When implemented, these personalization efforts increase average order value and higher conversion rates.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

Black Crow will take over the world in 2022 and beyond. They utilize machine learning to create audience profiles that allow you to reach a more engaged audience. In six weeks of using Black Crow, our conversion rate from our Facebook ads increased 29%.

Growth marketers will have to continue to learn and refine their skill sets in 2022 and beyond. Google Analytics 4 is the new default in 2022 and beyond, so get ready to relearn how to configure your analytics reporting in a way that makes sense for your organization.

Bas Willems, head of marketing, DataSnipper

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

Be fun: B2B doesn’t stand for boring-to-boring. Too many B2B marketers turn into boring and serious people when they start working at B2B software companies. Why so serious? It’s in the nature of people to love whom they can laugh with. Make sure your audience can laugh with you. Entertaining and informal content can be packed with strong and impactful messaging, without crossing the line. B2B marketing should be a show, not a list of specs and features.

Focus on ARR: Marketing teams should be more focused on adding ARR/revenue to the company. Marketing OKRs should be aligned on this. Today, technology is capable of showing clear and easy-to-understand attribution models to understand how marketing is impacting overall ARR. Note for this: Many sales-marketing teams think revenue attribution is just a way for marketing to prove value. But it’s not. It’s a way to focus on what matters most.

Build communities: There is a strong trend of building personal brands online. As a B2B company, building communities around these personal brands fits in this need for individuals to stand out of the crowd and shine. When individuals are offered this opportunity, it’s amazing to see how fast your users will turn into brand advocates. Help them grow, and they will help you grow.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

It’s a requirement: In B2B, influencer marketing works really well if you work with the right experts to build communities around your market, product and brand. Especially if you offer a product that solves a real and true pain for the user, the emotion that these influencers release is far more powerful than memory alone. I expect that influencer marketing, or marketing done by the individual brand, will increase even further in 2022.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Keep using: I love short-form videos and we’re going to see much more of them in 2022. Especially in B2B marketing, which is a little behind of the fast-changing B2C marketing space, short-form videos have just begun to prove their value.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

Zero priority. Many people think AI in marketing is a goal in itself. Like in 2010, everyone just wanted an app for the sake of having an app. AI is great if it will help you achieve your goals, but it has very limited use cases. I am a B2B marketer though, and I do believe that AI will have its value earlier in the B2C space, where target audiences are 100x bigger. They’re great examples already of really interesting AI use cases where great short-form videos are combined with amazing AI and deepfake.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

In B2B, yes. In B2C no. It depends on the size of your marketing audience. Most B2B company websites are simply not having enough traffic to implement advanced personalization technologies. Personalization in B2B is easier to accomplish in line with, e.g., the trend of account-based marketing, where marketing can help sales teams to hypertarget specific companies with custom and personalized content. You can use software like HubSpot or Demandbase for this. In B2C though, advanced real-time personalization is a real thing. I worked at one of the largest Dutch telcos in the past and they used BlueConic as their CDP. It served out seven versions of their homepage in real time, based on user engagement and preferences. It was insane and it hit also many cultural and political boundaries of the company; who is in control of what content is shown on the homepage? It is the executive team? Or the user itself driven by technology?

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

  • Revenue attribution tools, like dreamdata.io for B2B marketing.
  • Short-form video creation tools, like loom.com and synthesia.io for the use of B2B marketing.
  • User experimentation collaboration tools, like reveall.co.

Have you watched the [AMC] series “Mad Men”? Gone are the days where CMOs are classic advertising kings. CMOs need to be technical enough to leverage the latest tool and technologies and empathic enough to turn B2B software products into emotion.

Gus Ferguson and Alyssa Crankshaw, co-founders, Ascendant

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions? 

  1. Hire more growth marketers: We’ve got so many growth marketing jobs that we’ll be actively recruiting for in January! Finding top talent is the biggest challenge for anyone managing growth teams.
  2. Launch a Growth Academy: Exceptional growth marketers have a particular set of skills that are hard to find. We’re working on an Ascendant accelerated learning program that distills our years of experience and honing of these core growth skills into a course for junior marketers that takes a few months. It makes a lot of sense… We’ll get to hire promising junior marketers we’ve trained in the way we work, and we’ll be able to offer clients access to junior growth marketers, optimized by Ascendant, for their teams. First cohort launching early next year … stay tuned.
  3. Work with more awesome clients: We choose to work exclusively with startups, scaleups and corporate ventures because we get caught up in the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of the teams we work with. It’s a vibe. We want more of it. For 2022, we’re particularly interested in getting more involved with web3 projects. So, if you’re a founder who’s decentralizing the world and reading this then we want to talk with you!

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

It’s not a fad. Influencer marketing is a huge part of content marketing, of which we do a LOT. It’s not a fad, but it is a very misunderstood strategy. Influencer marketing is often seen as paying social superstars to promote products or mention your service. That’s not influencer marketing, it’s just advertising.

As an organic-first marketer myself, I find paid relationships pretty unexciting and any benefits are short term. Sometimes short-term bumps are what’s needed, but in general, I’d never recommend this.

At Ascendant, we see influencer marketing in a different way … If your influencer relationships are all based on the money, then your client’s just seen as The Bank. The promotion is very often inauthentic. I’m sure everyone can think of a podcast where listening to the fake endorsements are just painful, and once the endorsement ends, so does the relationship until you open your wallet again.

I think we’re already past the point where paid influencer advertising will see rapidly diminishing returns as the audience becomes ever more sensitive to what’s an ad and what’s genuine. It won’t die, it’ll just be less effective … which means that it’ll just be a channel for big brands, where individual channel results are less business-critical than at high-growth companies.

Building networks of influencers organically, i.e., without financial incentive, is challenging, very fun and done correctly, the reach you can achieve via a network of trusted, influential sources can be extremely rewarding. As with most organic growth strategies, you have to invest time and brains at the beginning to come up with and test creative strategies, but once you’ve nailed it, then it keeps on giving over the long term. The prize is worth it.

If you can successfully cultivate genuine business friendships with those that influence your audience, and you’re seen by your audience regularly chatting to them on Twitter, or appearing on their YouTube channels or guesting on their podcasts again and again, or whatever, then those repetitive, consistent and truly authentic relationships are an insanely powerful marketing asset.

We’ve achieved some of our most spectacular results from this kind of work on behalf of our clients. It’s probably my favorite marketing strategy.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

I’ve been playing around with AI content creation software recently, like Copy.AI and Copysmith.AI.

They’re pretty cool, but copywriters don’t need to start looking for new jobs just yet … They still need a lot of human input to be usable. It’s actually more interesting as a content ideation tool as some of the ways they misinterpret the brief can open up an unusual way of thinking about something.

Apart from that, it’s not really on our radar, other than being behind the scenes in an increasing number of tools we use.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

We do a lot of marketing automation and CRM for clients. We’ve set up integrated martech stacks and data ecosystems from scratch numerous times and it gives you a deep understanding of how data works and how to map messages to specific behaviors that indicate a user’s position in your funnel.

We use HubSpot a lot as they have huge discounts for startups. We also use Salesforce + Autopilot, which allows you to build some very sophisticated automation logic. And various others of the huge number of marketing automation tools that there are out there: Reply.io and Outreach.io are good for sales automation. Customer.io and Klaviyo are good for e-commerce. But there’s still not one tool that does everything well for some reason!

We’ve actually started working a lot with a tool called Vero, which is a more technical solution that integrates directly with your database rather than syncing data between two separate databases — it means you can build logic based on anything that exists in your database that traditionally you’d have to have a CRM tool to manage. It’s really powerful and feels like the future.

As cookies are phased out, it’s going to throw up some challenges to identifying users for behaviorally triggered personalization. It’s potentially a very big obstacle to personalization at the levels achievable now. I’m looking forward to exploring how we’ll get around that!

Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

I don’t think that you have to learn to code to be a great growth marketer if that’s what is being asked. I do think you need to have a mindset for understanding the underlying mechanics of how things work.

I’d definitely advise all growth marketers to get up to speed with how data works. Being able to think in terms of objects, properties, fields and variables is a superpower for a growth marketer, and it has relevance across all channels.

A great way to start learning data is to take an advanced spreadsheet training course. Superior spreadsheet skills are essential. Life is so much easier as a growth marketer when you know how to use pivot tables, vlookup and all the basic formulae. Not sure if that falls under technical marketing, but I’m almost definitely going hire a growth marketer that can demonstrate their mad spreadsheet skills lol!

Shane Hegde, founder and CEO, Air

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

We’ve been fortunate to see some incredible growth this past year, and our resolution is to keep that momentum going. In response, customers have doubled down in the product and continue to retain and expand.

  • Today, over 10 million+ images and videos are managed on Air (+100% growth YoY).
  • Weekly active users are up over +100% in the last year.
  • On average, paid customers to double in size every six months (six-month ARR retention of +200%).
  • Air has seen revenue growth of 903% in the past 12 months for DTC and e-commerce brands.

Our platform has proven to be helpful for marketers amidst the pandemic, and our goal for 2022 is to continue to sustain and support marketing teams as they shift from remote work to back in person. Our goal is to become the go-to creative operations system for marketing teams for any brand across any industry.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

It’s a must. If there’s one thing the past couple of years have taught us, it’s that the creator economy is the future and will only continue to grow and strengthen in the upcoming years. Online creators and influencers continue to dominate not only the online space but traditional spaces as well. Many are making the jump to traditional media and mainstream celebrity, with creators like Mr.Beast appearing on Jimmy Kimmel, the D’Amelio Family having a Hulu reality show and Addison Rae’s multipicture deal with Netflix.

In our opinion, influencers also tend to build more of a connection and community with their followers, making marketing with them more effective. As for what companies should be investing in influencer marketing — whatever companies have a target demographic that’s online. The beauty of the internet is that there’s a place for everyone and everything, you just have to find it. A B2B company can find just as much success with influencer marketing as a B2C company, you just need to know where your audience is.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Marketers should definitely continue using short-form videos in 2022. While they’ve definitely reached new heights in the past year with the continued rise of TikTok, we don’t anticipate a fall coming any time soon. Short-form video platforms are not only succeeding, but they’re acting as the blueprint for new features on other platforms. Instagram, YouTube and other major online players have launched their own short-form features on their platforms in an attempt to imitate the success many have found through TikTok. There will always be a demand for short-form content, the same way there will always be a demand for long-form content. And while platforms like YouTube mastered long-form content distribution years ago, only recently has short-form content been truly optimized. We have just started to breach the surface of short-form content potential, and we’re excited to see how it continues to progress and grow.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

AI marketing can have great results if done correctly. You shouldn’t be leaning into AI solely because it’s “trendy” — your campaign needs to actually mean something to your customers/audience. Starbucks is a good example of AI marketing done right. Starbucks uses their loyalty card and mobile app to collect and analyze customer data, such as what they purchase, where and at what time of day. Then, they use predictive analytics to send customers personalized marketing messages including recommendations based on location or weather, special offers that increase spending, etc.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

Similar to AI, personalization isn’t overhyped if done correctly. If your personalization is being directed by the correct data and offering recommendations that are actually useful, you are bound to see some success. However, it’s also important to make sure that you aren’t shoving recommendations/personalized messages in your customer’s face to the point where it’s more annoying than helpful. Don’t go overboard with it, otherwise, you’ll drive people away. There’s a fine line between being helpful and effective with your messaging, and just turning into spam.

As for specific tools, there are a few key e-commerce products like Klaviyo for email and SMS and Octane AI that are pushing zero/first-party data movement advising marketers to collect, own and use the data they collect directly from consumers (as opposed to relying on data from Facebook, Google and Apple — which is disappearing) to run personalized campaigns at scale. Both companies also offer up great content to get up to speed on the topic and how to best use their tools.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

Marketing automation tools likely to take off in 2022 will be centered around the data privacy changes (with more coming in the future). This means that brands will need to start building their “owned” data (first/zero-party data) and learning how to leverage that across their tech stack (emails, website, SMS, ads) to build more personalized and powerful campaigns that cut through the noise and live up the increasing expectations that consumers have about how and when brands communicate with them.

Tracey Wallace, director of marketing, MarketerHire

​​What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

My 2022 growth marketing resolution is to wean myself off of attribution models that will increasingly become unreliable. We’re embracing incrementality testing and media mix modeling beginning right now, and it will be a learning curve for our team. We’ve hired a marketing analyst to help us on this journey, as well. It will be important for marketing teams in general to get comfortable with this type of measurement and be able to effectively communicate what the data tells us to management, executives, founders and investors. 2022 will be a very interesting year for marketing measurement, indeed.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

Influencer marketing isn’t new. Companies have long partnered with celebrities and organizations that have larger followings and more credibility than the brand itself. Pepsi and Britney Spears. Chanel and Beyoncé. Even Shopify and Tim Ferris. It isn’t a fad, nor is it a requirement. It is one of several strategies brands of all kinds can use to grow their audience, sales and revenue.

The difference today, though, is that there are far more influencers than ever before thanks to social media. Individuals can build highly engaged, niche audiences on several different social platforms — and that means that influencer marketing is limited to only those brands with incredibly large budgets. Any brand can go and request a Cameo right now — and pay under $5,000 for a quick influencer marketing hit. But just because influencer marketing is more accessible than ever before doesn’t mean that brands should treat it as a tactic. Like so much else in marketing, influencer marketing needs a cohesive and integrated strategy. Which types of influencers will you use, on which platforms, how often? How will you measure their impact? How will you use their partnership to grow not just your sales, but your community –– and help your brand expand beyond the audience you’ve already built?

These are important questions to determine before you heavily invest in influencer marketing. No brand should invest solely because everyone else seems to be. Figure out your way, your strategy, your goals. And then determine your tactics.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Nothing has peaked if it is still working for your brand. Marketers shouldn’t blindly follow marketing trends as reported by others. Everything needs to be a test, and if something continues working for your brand far after others say it has “peaked,” who cares? The numbers are what matter the most, and it is important marketers educate founders and investors on this, as well, or else they’ll get caught in a hamster wheel of constantly shifting priorities based on what other people are doing.

Besides, people have been saying email marketing is dead for years. If any brand followed that advice, they wouldn’t be here anymore. Do what works for your company, and test new channels to see what is possible. And remember, not every brand needs to use every channel, strategy or tactic. Less is more.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

AI marketing is a tool, like all the other marketing tools and software out there. I encourage my team to test it out so we can understand if it can help us do our jobs better. I’ve yet to find a copy AI tool I really like, or that I think can do a better job of producing a first draft. But we might find that to be the case as these algorithms learn over time.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

Personalization is a lot like community or growth in marketing circles. No one really understands exactly what it means — and it seems to be quite different at every organization. I don’t think personalization on its own is a trend. Personalization is a marketing truism. People respond better when things are more relevant to them. That’s why Facebook advertising has become the leader in the space over the last decade. They had so much data, and advertisers could use that data to get more relevant, personalized ads in front of the right people.

But personalization can go too far. Marketers must be careful, and they need to be thoughtful about how they build a relationship with customers over time.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

Growth marketers are already one of the most technical roles in a marketing organization, and many of these practitioners come from development or data science backgrounds. I’m not certain how much more technical they can get.

What I do think we’ll see are more automation specialists joining or freelancing for marketing teams. This is because marketing teams have become a central hub of production for companies, and that means teams need more organization, project management and automation than ever before. Doing this right will prevent burnout for marketers, but marketing leadership needs to recognize all the different personality types and working styles that exist within a marketing organization. Creative folks on the brand or social media side might get overwhelmed with the amount of work or rigid processes where they feel they can’t exercise their creative freedom. More technical and analytical folks like growth marketers or paid search marketers might get frustrated at long approval cycles and a lack of autonomy in optimizing areas where they have deep expertise.

This is a new era of work, and marketing is front and center –– with many more changes to come in 2022. It is crucial for companies to support their marketing teams through these changes, help them organize and resource effectively, and understand how to work in remote or hybrid roles in which the amount of work and responsibility have increased. It’s no wonder marketing salaries are skyrocketing right now. Marketers are managing a lot.

Greg Sheppard, CMO, Templafy

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Short-form content from outlets like TikTok, InstaReels, YouTube Shorts, etc. have seen unprecedented popularity, and marketers in the B2B world cannot count it out. In fact, HubSpot’s 2022 Marketing Industry Trends Survey recently found short-form video has the highest ROI of any social media marketing strategy with 30% of social media marketers planning to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022. What’s more, research from Wyzowl shows 86% of video marketers said video increased traffic to their website in December 2020, and 78% said video directly helped increase their sales.

All this goes to show that short-form video marketing is on the rise. In the B2B world specifically, brands can sometimes have complicated value props, so when you’re able to succinctly articulate your offer in a video less than two minutes long it can prove to be an incredibly valuable top-of-funnel tool. In 2022, short-form videos shouldn’t be forgotten in any social media marketing strategy.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

All signs are pointing toward a continued AI explosion. In fact, a recent Gartner Inc. report found that the AI software market is expected to hit $62.5 billion next year — up 21.3% from this year. However, it’s all about how marketers will use AI technology. It won’t be good enough to implement it for the sake of following a trend. I believe marketers need to use AI to up their personalization strategy even further. To be successful in B2B marketing you have to be able to speak to your audience in a personalized way — show them exactly how your tool is solving problems they face on a daily basis. If you can utilize AI to help you in that quest, then you’ll be able to successfully utilize this growing trend in 2022.

Which marketing automation tools do you think are poised to take off in 2022? Should growth marketers plan to become more technical in the coming year?

It’s now clear that remote and hybrid work is here to stay. The new Digital HQ means marketers must adapt their workflows to drive efficiency within the new norm. Accessing, standardizing and delivering content is more important than ever — but it’s also more difficult than ever without the centralization provided by in-person work. In 2022, content enablement platforms like Templafy are poised to win, as it’s time to take the guesswork out of document creation and allow employees to be more productive while creating more impactful work, no matter where they are.

 

Lauren Kelly, CMO, ThoughtExchange

What are your 2022 growth marketing resolutions?

  1. Never forget that our marketing efforts are inextricably tied to our greater organizational purpose to build positive, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers, community, colleagues and the planet.
  2. Be open and engaged in dialogues of what’s happening in the market. Instead of forcing solutions, offer customers agile, actionable solutions to make them successful.
  3. Merge qualitative insights with quantitative data to make decisions.

There was a lot of discussion about influencer marketing in 2021, but is it a fad or a requirement? If it is a must, what types of companies need to invest in this area?

With factors such as the pandemic playing in, influencer marketing spending soared in the U.S. this year, hitting the multibillions, and it’s forecasted to continue rising. Taking up a noticeable chunk of marketing budgets, it’s no wonder it’s a hot topic amongst marketers and general business folk alike. Into 2022 and beyond we’ll likely see some tightening up on ROI reporting on influencer marketing activities, given its rate of adoption. That said, influencer marketing is already fast becoming a must-or-miss-out investment for marketers. And for brands diving in, it’s important to note that the type of influencers are changing. No longer is an influencer only someone who has a lot of followers, being an ambassador for your products. With the rise of niche influencers including influencer-creators and microinfluencers, brands will have a greater scope of influencers to opt to work with. For us, as a purpose-driven business, we will be looking to partner increasingly with the types of influencers who align with our values. And with this approach, we’ll be both aiming to further purchasing and consumption behaviors for intentional, long-term, lasting success and growth and exemplify doing well by doing good.

Have short-form videos (2:30 or less) peaked, or should marketers keep using this tool in 2022?

Over the past couple of years, marketers doubled down on digital, the single most viable channel during COVID. As a result, the digital space has become uncomfortably crowded, making it seemingly near impossible for most brands to be noticed amidst the overcrowding and noise. The good news is that short-form video is still an important tool in the marketer’s toolbox to help break through the clutter. The continued growth of TikTok, as just one example, suggests that short-form videos are far from peaking. With content volume rising, attention spans decreasing, one way to get your point across is through short, succinct, videos that make every second count and respect and value your consumers’ online time … and strained eyeballs.

Where does AI marketing fall on your list of priorities for 2022? Should marketing teams be leaning into this, or is it industry/customer-specific?

I never prioritize AI marketing at the cost of being authentic and relatable to our customers. Our top priority is respecting and valuing our customers’ precious time and attention. So certainly, if we experiment with a chatbot and learn that it is actually saving them time and suits their needs and interests, we’ll incorporate it into our mix. However, if there’s even the tiniest indication that an AI tool is coming across as impersonal, inauthentic or is less efficient to our customers, we would not continue to use it simply for the sake of being innovative or forward-thinking.

Similarly, is the personalization trend overhyped? Which specific tools and platforms do you recommend for non-technical marketers who want to get up to speed?

It’s not overhyped — but the term personalization has become a little diluted. For instance, “Dear <first name>” is technically personalized, but a lot of the time, the rest of the email is a standard message, so overall it doesn’t feel personalized to the customer at all. The holy grail is there, however — which is why the hype is real — McKinsey states that personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5% to 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10% to 30%. That’s nothing to laugh at. So when it works, personalized marketing can pay off — but I don’t think we’ve cracked the code yet. Another McKinsey survey of senior marketing leaders found a couple of years ago that only 15% of CMOs believed their company was on the right track with personalization. Unfortunately, the marketing world hasn’t made major strides forward yet, but the opportunity is definitely there.