5 Trends For Small Business Marketing In 2022

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John Jantsch (00:54): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm gonna do a solo show to start the year off. Right? In fact, I'm gonna talk about small business marketing trends for 2022. Yep. It's that time of year, once again, time for lots of folks like me to wax on about what we see out there on the horizon. So that folks like you can perhaps be a little more prepared to respond to the coming shifts marketing. Really. I think in a lot of ways, the real service, a posts like this is maybe to help put a name on things that you're probably already starting to feel. I mean, I don't have any special knowledge about the future. Uh, I, I do view things. I think through a lens that's informed by my thousands of conversations with small business owners, as well as influence alike.

John Jantsch (01:43): So that's, uh, the, really the basis of my predicting if you will. But one of the things that I think we ought do, I've been doing this for years now. Every year, this time of year I, maybe what we ought do is take a look, just a brief look back at last year's post and maybe give myself a little bit of a score for how I did. It's really easy to sit here and say, this is going to happen. Let's go back and reflect and see if it did actually happen. So I'll read 'em off and give you just a little commentary on what I thought happened. So one of the trends I predicted was paying attention would become a survival mechanism. Now this is a really hard one to quantify, but I think the companies in my experience, it's the companies that really, we looked at most of the stages of their customer journey.

John Jantsch (02:29): I think those companies. So I think in a lot of ways, that's a sign of this idea of paying attention. I mean, everything, so many things changed. And so really people are willing and able to have a new experience. Now I think that that, that probably did come true. Second trend was everything gets smaller. I'm not sure that really happened. I think people, I think things got more personal, maybe just based on, you know, the flu that we're all still in today, but maybe not smaller. So I might have been premature on that one. AI gets practical was the next trend. I nailed this one. I mean, look around, of course this was coming for a number of years, but you can't produce an app these days without AI baked into a it. And so I think that to small business owners are seeing that the it's not just this futuristic thing anymore.

John Jantsch (03:24): It has a very practical application, particularly when it comes to producing transcripts and producing content in general talent investment is back in style. I said, I don't know about this one. I mean, the great resignation that, or so-called great resignation that, that everybody's talking about. I really think it's just caused so much scrambling in the hiring scene that I'm not sure people are investing or at least that's not the right term right now. I mean, they're, they're raising rates, they're raising salaries, they're raising hourly rates and I'm not sure it's the same thing that, that I'd hoped would actually come about. I still think this one will happen. I just think things have to settle down. Video gets personal again. Sure. Video, including one on 1, 1, 2, 1 video. I mean, sending somebody a sales, you know, video, I think that it's pretty hot. Maybe it's kind of peaked, uh, a little bit because the novelties worn off a little bit, but one of the things I don't think I saw coming was the explosion of audio as a personal medium.

John Jantsch (04:34): Now you're, if you're listening to this podcast, you consume audio content. But look at all the ways the social platforms there's even, you know, new platforms cropping up today that are based solely on audio. And I think there's something about the idea of somebody walking around, driving in their car, running on a treadmill with, with one person in their head talking to them. So, uh, podcasts obviously are hot, but I think you're gonna see extensions of this idea, continue this, this idea of audio content really continue in other ways, uh, to be baked into things. All right, two more. I said, UX, uh, user experience and SEO gets attached at the hip. Now this one didn't really take a crystal ball. I mean, Google has been signaling this idea of for, uh, a long time and, and with the rollout or the, at least the focus on core web vitals, you know, your content shifting the, what it looks like on a mobile, how fast it loads, you know, these are all user experience, uh, clues that, that are getting you pinged or, or penalized for SEO purposes so that one's here to stay.

John Jantsch (05:45): Uh, my last one, uh, was a coaching ranks swell. I really saw the idea that, that so many people, the great resignation, if you will, people reevaluating what they wanna do for a living jumping into new careers. I really thought coaching was going to take off and, and it certainly has. It's continued to grow. It's been a growing, uh, industry. I still think this is coming. I I'm still very bullish on this, but because I think that this truly is going to be something where, how people, including marketing agencies start to position their work. This idea of this idea of, of tactics done for you. Tactics is really just a race to the bottom. And so we need a coach. We need that trusted advisor that that is going to help us make sense of it all. And that's the, I think the missing piece. So I think I'm still betting on coaching ranks, uh, swelling, but I don't think they did that at the level that I thought it would. All right, with that bit of housekeeping done and out of let's move on to what I view as the top small business trends. Maybe they're marketing, maybe they're not all marketing trends of 2022. All right. Number one, brand purpose takes the place of authenticity.

John Jantsch (06:55): Now you might wanna chew on that one for a little while. I mean, authenticity is probably at least a decade old buzzword that, that frankly, most people struggled at a fine let alone deliver . But one thing that the great shakeup, um, which believe it or not we're entering year three of has done is force people to search for meaning in their work. And I think that that just translates into meaning in the people they do business with meaning in who they associate with and, and certainly for businesses, what their brand stands for promises. I think this idea is going to become, it's actually been a significant differentiator for brands, but I think it's going to become that. That truly allows, I mean, without it, it, you are gonna fall behind. I think people will make choices based much more on connection with the brand.

John Jantsch (07:48): Now, I don't know, maybe this won't last that long, but for right now, just make sure that you are focused on helping people connect with what you stand for in your business, more important than ever.

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John Jantsch (09:10): Events are still virtual. Yes, that's right. A I think fully into 2022, we're still going to see a lot of events canceled. We're gonna see a lot of events never coming back. You know, I, I, I felt like mid twenty, twenty one, we were gonna call an end to this. I mean, in the fall of 2021, a lot of conferences, uh, came about, but a less, I think that this now is going to carry into 2022. It doesn't mean we're not gonna have conferences. Those, you know, we're gonna live with whatever it is we're living with right now.

John Jantsch (09:42): People are gonna figure out how to cope. But I do think that that, that what we've gone through the last few years is going to continue to influence the habits of business travel and, and really education as well. I think that for 2022, many significant events will get better at hybrid offerings last year, that was kind of a throw in. It's like, oh, if you don't wanna come here, buy a cheap ticket and we'll stream some stuff to you. I think they're gonna get better at a hybrid experience. And I also think that this probably isn't related as much to events, but if you wanna think about events, I think that forming cohorts of like eight or 10 people to go through an experience together. So it might not be an event. It might be something that is a quarter over a course of a quarter. You're gonna get together with people kind of mastermind. But I think that these are gonna take place of your typical course at membership programs.

John Jantsch (10:38): Number four, I think I'm up to co-marketing is no longer a biz big biz play. So I've always loved co-marketing, I've done it for years with the smallest of businesses. I think it can be a really, really great play. Most people when they think about it, they immediately start thinking, you say Ru red bull and GoPro, you know, how they market together, but really any business can do this. And I think it's a necessity. This is why I'm calling it a trend now, because I mean, it's pretty much become impossible, a cold call. I really, it's not even that simple to network even anymore. Some of the ways that people used to get in front of specs, but I think co-marketing, it's essentially a twist on referrals and I, I could make, you know, the whole idea of referral generation and a focus on referral generation is, is clearly something that I'm bullish on.

John Jantsch (11:30): I mean, it was a big part of my last, uh, book, the ultimate marketing engine. I wrote a book called the referral engine. So obviously it's something that's, it's always been on my mind. I think it's kind of cropped back up again because, because of the re the, the fact that it's so hard to get in front of prospects. So the idea that, that you're happy customers, strategic partners, people that you co-market with will actually share some of the burden of, of passing you around of, of, of letting people know that you're out there. It's a, it, the thing I love about co-marketing is you, you set something up, I mean, where you, you are marketing with other business, they're sharing your story, you're sharing their story. I mean, it's kind of a passive, uh, way to create great exposure. And I think, I think that's a idea in 2022 for the proactive small business is a big one.

John Jantsch (12:19): All right, two more small business learns to outsource content. Let's start with two painful maybe, but glaring facts, content is there. I mean, really can't do much in, in marketing if you're gonna scale or grow it all, you know, without a lot of content. And, and the second fact creating helpful content is hard. It's hard work. The most large organizations have decided to create a storm of content by, you know, really content for every stage of the customer journey by building content teams internally. And this is the dirty secret that nobody tells you outsourcing a great deal of content productions to freelancers and, and even agencies. Now with the event of AI, something I talked about last year, especially in the realm of content creation, I think many small businesses are going to be able to compete in the content game by employ relatively inexpensive content partners, armed with AI tools, AI tools.

John Jantsch (13:21): They're not perfect, but they allow somebody who doesn't really know your business that well to, to collect all the information that's out there in the world and create really brilliant content, start looking at outsourcing your content. It's probably something you can do a lot cheaper than doing it yourself. Plus you might not be very good at doing it yourself. Like it's funny to see some of these, uh, competitions now, you know, where AI's producing in blind studies. I actually better content or more readable content, more useful content. So give it a look. All right. The last one is kinda way out there. I, I, but it's also something that people are probably sick of hearing about and that's NFTs non fungible tokens. All right. I know you've heard it. You've probably sick of hearing it. You maybe don't have a clue what it is, but you you've certainly heard about it.

John Jantsch (14:20): I mean, unless you just, haven't been online in the last couple years. So the, the idea of a non fungible token, what is it? I mean, an NFT, non fungible token means very little, frankly. I'm not gonna try to explain, uh, what it is. That's a posts or podcast episode or two in, in and of its own. And there's so much great stuff out there right now. You can go as deep as you want, go read up on all things, you know, crypto, which, which NFTs are, are related to. So NFTs, you probably recall made kind of a giant splash from a 20, 20, 20, 21, mainly in the world of collectible digital arts. See, that's the non fungible part, you know, and like Bitcoin and tokens that you can exchange. I mean, if somebody has a Bitcoin token and you exchange Bitcoin token with them, but essentially you have the same thing that you started with, but an NFT is usually an original of some sort, but it's built on cryptocurrency on blockchain.

John Jantsch (15:19): Uh, usually Ethereum and it's a bit like a contract. I mean, there'll be copies. Like there's all kinds of, you know, original stuff that people have paid millions for. Now that, that just because it's digital, it's actually pretty easy to copy it. But with blockchain attached, you can actually prove that yours is the original and kind of the cool thing. And I think you're gonna see a lot of practical uses this. You may not be in an industry where you're like, this is gonna make any sense to me, but trust me, you know, 10 years from now, it'll what I'm talking about now will be so boring and mainstream that, that it it'll be like talking about blogs and podcasts, frankly, but here's the cool thing then I think we'll, we'll make it, uh, interesting with an NFT. You can think of like original artwork, but just think about a concert ticket that the artists that, that can enhance and actually continue connection because you bought that ticket.

John Jantsch (16:18): Let's say you're the first 100 buyers to a certain concert. And maybe you get, you know, something through that ticket on an ongoing basis. Maybe I release an album in two years from now. And you get, because you bought that ticket, you now two years later get access to the digital downloads of, you know, the studio versions or rehearsals or something like that. So it's really gives us the ability to create a, a community, you know, token, you know, concert tickets. I talking about, uh, you know, think about content creators, frankly, content creators are going to start, uh, rewarding people creating their own tokens. This has already happened their own cryptocurrency for people that subscribe to the newsletter or share their newsletters, or do certain things. So, so think about this idea of, of, of a community token of a community currency that, that people are going to, to be able to join and trade.

John Jantsch (17:10): And those things will become, you know, more valuable. So is you may not be ready to jump in with both feet on this one, but just start paying attention. I mean, it's already happening. I mean, it's way past mainstream in a lot of circles, but now's the time I think for really small business to start paying attention and not to, not to the hype people, not to Gary V, sorry. Don't wanna pick on Gary V if you're a fan, but, but, but don't use that as your example, because he's doing things that are just out there to be out there, read up on folks like Joe Palitz and, uh, the tilt or Brian Clark's unemployable. They are talking about this in a way. I think that will make it make sense to you. All right, that's it for now? Hope you get 20, 22 off to a great start.

John Jantsch (17:53): Depend upon when you're listening to this, uh, maybe you're down the track with 20, 22, love, those reviews certainly reach out and let me know what you think. Let me know what you'd like me to talk about and, uh, we'll see on the next show.

John Jantsch (18:05): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client's tab.