Knowledge is a marketer’s best friend, but getting reliable industry-wide stats and insights is tough these days, which is why HubSpot, Rock Content, Litmus, and Wistia combined forces to produce the State of Inbound Marketing 2022, a new report aimed at bringing marketers the information they need to make the best decisions.
Together, we gathered data from over 1,600 marketers worldwide, covering both B2B and B2C industries, to offer meaningful insights on:
- The channels marketers are most active on
- The effectiveness of various Marketing strategies
- Emerging Marketing trends
What we’ve produced is a mammoth report with over 50 pages of goodness covering, among other things, up-to-date explorations on the state of content, digital, social media, and email marketing.
Here are a few of the report’s most surprising and unsurprising findings, although to dig more into them and the many other findings, you’ll need to check it out for yourself by clicking on the image below.
Surprising: The majority of marketers expect 2022 budget increases
With inflation rocking workers and companies around the world and headline news decrying the major drop in venture capital funding, you’d think that every marketing budget was in imminent danger.
Thankfully, you’d be wrong. Despite notable layoffs, the job market is still going strong, with the United States actually adding jobs in May and June, including in coveted industries like Tech.
Accordingly, 48% of marketing teams expect their budgets to increase during 2022, a marked rise from 2021.
One way marketers are making sure that extra money doesn’t get wasted? Increased use of content templates.
Unsurprising: Marketers want to focus on quality content, not quantity
Although the rise of social media in marketing lends itself toward daily posting schedules, the vast majority of marketers are pushing back against rote content dumps. 83% of marketers believe creating higher quality content less often is more effective than alternative strategies.
This need to focus on quality to stand out in crowded markets reflects brands’ emphasis on creating their own path via memorable content experiences, with interactive and funny assets like quizzes, short videos, and virtual events leading the way for the most effective content types.
Surprising: A comeback from desktop?
Web traffic continues to come from a variety of sources, which favors more varied and targeted strategies if one channel fails to convert for a company.
Organic search traffic leads all sources, as it’s responsible for 27% of incoming traffic. This is yet another reminder of the value of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and investing resources to climb Google’s page rankings.
The most surprising aspect of web traffic is the split between mobile and desktop, with mobile registering 41% of traffic and desktops 38%. This is a drop from mobile’s 53% of web traffic from 2019.
While companies still need to optimize sites and content for desktop, mobile, and tablet views, the surge in desktop traffic could be something to watch for given the shift in work culture and more people working remotely.
Unsurprising: Video sits atop the content pyramid
For the third consecutive year, video is the top content marketing format. The pivot-to-video era began in 2015 to much reluctance given the abrupt shift in desired labor skills, but the move eventually paid off.
Unique to 2022 is the fact that short-form video–largely thanks to elements like Instagram stories & reels and other social platforms introducing analogues–delivers the best ROI of all video formats.
The combination of video marketing and interactive content is one of the main trends to watch in 2022 and beyond.
Surprising: Influencer marketing is still a key marketing tool
When asked what marketing trends they were leveraging, 34% of companies noted influencer marketing, a higher mark than any other trend.
The primary role social media plays in marketing has endured, and influencer marketing goes hand in hand with the platforms, particularly Instagram and TikTok, the two driving the effectiveness of short-form video the most.
However, with public trust in influencers at an all-time low and younger generations seemingly having savvied up to many influencers’ tricks, to see the trend persist and more popular than any other might make readers pause and reconsider their marketing tactics on social media platforms, one way or the other.
In a report as detailed and long as the State of Inbound Marketing 2022, there are innumerable things to surprise and inform you, so if you want to be as ready as you can be to market in 2022, get the full report now.
