Upcoming Digital Marketing Trends for 2022 in Nepal
The year 2021 has certainly challenged marketers throughout the Nepalese industry to explore and exploit the realm of digital marketing. With the corona pandemic immobilizing the traditional marketing mediums, brands have diverted their focus to advertise through digital mediums.
Santosh Shrestha, former president of AAN, mentioned that “Digital trend in Nepal started about a decade ago but the coronavirus has given a significant boost to its growth and development. Now the advertisers plan their campaign with mobile phones at the center”. Consequently, the nascent digital marketing industry of Nepal has seen various trends owing to the pandemic. Below are some of them that we believe will occupy the marketing industry in 2022.
Marketing on “The Metaverse”
Facebook rebranding into “Meta” was undeniably the biggest tech news of 2021. The avant-garde “metaverse” project of Meta is aiming to redefine social connection through Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality (VR) and virtual world technologies. Seemingly preposterous, the metaverse allows users to connect in a virtual world through lifelike avatars while digitally engaging in many of the same activities we do in the real world.
The real challenge here, for marketers, is to devise innovative advertising strategies within the digital or virtual space itself. This is pivotal from a marketing point of view since Meta is obvious to attract the large user-base of Facebook into its domain.
Influencer Marketing on the Rise
Prior to the age of social media, the most common influencers were the celebrities with mass followings. However, influencers have become rampant across social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Rise of influencers, accompanied by an ever-increasing number of social media users, should trigger brands to invest in sponsorship as well as activation campaigns. Such a collaboration is bound to significantly increase brand recognition and mileage.
Short-Video Marketing
People mindlessly scrolling down through TikTok and YouTube Shorts is a common sight these days. With decline in the average attention span of humans to just eight seconds (One second lower than the infamously ill-focused goldfish), short-video marketing will most likely dominate the sphere of social media. Marketers will need to channel their creativity on quickly captivating people with short-length videos.
Redundancy of SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most common trick used by marketers to optimize the reach of advertisements in digital marketing. We often see marketers deploying excellent SEO techniques to reach masses of people. However, there is a dearth of quality content which degrades the overall user experience. With search algorithms becoming advanced and increasingly contextual, marketers will need to rely less on SEO hacks and focus on optimizing user experience.
Advertising Vs Privacy
Marketers digging into user data and behavior is certainly not an obscure news in the current day and age. As such, modern digital adverts are commonly dependent on consumer data for automatic optimization. However, there is a growing concern of privacy in consumers antagonized by unethical data collection of companies. Furthermore, Google’s decision to block third party cookies from Chrome is undoubtedly alarming to the marketers that rely on automation. Marketers will gradually need to engage in strategic marketing decisions that are able to influence consumers without a major breach of their privacy.
