Years ago, Apple ran TV ads for the newly launched iPhone, featuring the line, “There’s an app for that.” It was impossible to predict just how true that would become over the next decade. There are web apps, mobile apps, enterprise apps, and a universe of technologies and programming languages that have emerged in recent years. This technology supernova introduced a growing need for specialization. Experts can now spend their careers hyper-focused on a single technology solution or industry niche.
Marketing has followed the same path—especially technology marketing. With every new cloud containerization platform or threat remediation system, there is a new value set to communicate. And it has to be communicated precisely. Audiences can tell when they’re learning from an expert because true specialization is hard to fake. So while content remains king in 2022, it has to be credible.
We asked some leading marketing professionals for their predictions about tech content marketing trends in 2022, including:
- Social media
- Video
- Tech content production
- Interactive brand experiences
- Social impact
- DevRel
- Events
- Data customization
This is a collection of their insights, along with other predictions we found interesting.
Social Media
Social media marketing began as a specialty before it was folded into the rest of the marketing mix. Today, social has reemerged as a specialized discipline with a central role to play in tech marketing.
As the sophistication, reach, and value of social media grows, so does the importance of spending money on it. Since the early days of the pandemic, for example, social media ad spending has increased dramatically. We anticipate this trend continuing.
Live video streaming has also become a popular way to use social media. Tech companies should look for ways to capitalize on that trend, whether through Q&As with executives, product tutorials, announcements, launches, or offline event streams.
Video
For tech and B2B companies, video content is vital and appropriate at almost every stage of the marketing funnel. You can use it to introduce your value proposition to customers, highlight product features, and make announcements, as well as include it in pre-roll ads.
Video is also useful for live demos, webinars, whiteboard technical sessions, and live streams on social media channels. Increasingly, it can also be helpful in sales outreach. No matter how you want to employ it, video content strategy is an important, but challenging, tactic.
“In 2022, we will witness and discover more and more long-term video content strategies in the high-tech industry. A growing number of B2B companies are creating communications with B2C characteristics, whether that be the number of videos or creative concepts that will elicit a response from the target audience and increase brand awareness.”
Tech Content Production
Written content has been past the point of saturation for years. As a result, it’s harder to capture your audience’s attention than ever before. For today’s tech marketers, what matters most is creativity, quality, and a genuine voice that is impossible to ignore among the flurry of content out there.
“Empowering Creativity and Innovation. Creativity will play an increasingly significant role in the marketing world. The growing need for creativity and innovation will drive this trend. The current global demand for creativity and innovation will create more opportunities for creative individuals willing to take risks.”
“Diversified content brings in new audiences. The future for content creators looks bright. The competition for freelance writers is fierce, but the writing industry is growing at unprecedented speed. That means the demand for content creators is also high and will continue to increase.”
"Nobody reads our blog. It's just for SEO.’ That attitude has to change in 2022, and savvy tech marketers are beginning to recognize that we don't have to accept this status quo. The gap will inevitably continue to widen between those tech companies willing to invest in expert-based content that truly appeals to their target audience and those looking to save in the short run with fluff that checks the SEO boxes.”
Interactive Brand Experiences
User-generated content and interactive experiences help form an active relationship between your brand and audience, driving stronger connections with your business. Today, tech brands need to create interactive and engaging experiences.
“My main marketing predictions are hyper-personalized and increased interactive content. Today, the market is incredibly noisy. With AI and real-time data, we can now hyper-personalize content to each follower/potential customer—increasing engagement, relevance, and trust.”
Social Impact
Consumers in 2022 are often as interested in a company’s social impact as its bottom line. Marketing has a role to play in highlighting your brand’s efforts to improve the world and the lives of customers.
This is especially relevant in the tech world, as brands increasingly look to the cloud to improve transparency, collect better data, and intelligently pursue environmental and social goals—all as part of their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs.
“ESG is getting bigger and more important, especially environmental concerns, climate change, and sustainability. Best to board that train as early as possible.”
DevRel
When marketing and dev teams work well together, your product will be more closely aligned with user expectations. That’s the promise of DevRel. With the rise of product-led growth, we predict a quickly accelerating focus on DevRel this year.
“Developer Relations (AKA DevRel) and Developer Experience (DevX) are going to take center stage, more than ever, in 2022—with more and more nascent startups aiming to build dev-first, product-led growth strategies. No one wants to buy costly shelfware anymore, and the products that enable you to achieve a rapid time to value through an open-source or freemium experience will reign supreme. Being able to build these strategies from the ground up will be what differentiates between the rising stars and those who will be left behind.”
“There will be more focused areas of work for DevRel. This means that DevRels will do, create, and interact based on the type of company they are working for. Startups, mid-sized companies, and large organizations all have different methods for classic marketing. Same goes for DevRel.”
“I think we might start seeing more DevRel departments within large enterprises that are not reporting to another department. VP Developer Relations/Evangelist positions will start to crop up as management recognizes the need to be even more developer-centric.”
“Product-led growth is a difficult objective (especially because it is dependent on product and development), but if successful, can be a significant competitive advantage.”
Events
During the pandemic, online events quickly became the norm. This seems likely to continue in 2022. Tech marketers can use virtual events to organize communities, online meetups, webinars, and more.
“Everyone is sick of webinars and virtual events. Creativity, agility, and execution will be key to gaining the market’s attention. It’s important to combat virtual-event fatigue by making the events deeply personalized, valuable, and interactive.”
Data Customization
Data is created in astonishing amounts every day. As tech marketers become savvier about how to use it, they’ll be able to share increasingly personalized content. Beyond that, data can be used to make predictions about customer needs and behaviors. Marketers who know how to use it will be able to deliver messages at just the right time and place.
“As digital marketers continue to be overwhelmed with data they generate, and most of them probably don’t have enough capabilities to analyze it, we will see a rising trend in marketing tools leveraging AI that will start to take center stage in the digital marketing technology stack.”
“Tech marketing is not a silo… you need technologies to route, nurture, and track stages of a prospect’s journey. You also need metrics, success criteria, and analytics to monitor and improve marketing processes and content.”
Conclusion
Every advance in technology creates new ways to tell stories. Global distributed teams of tech marketers in 2022 are telling those stories using automation, AI, and other emerging tactics. Those methods are mixed with creative data-driven uses of traditional marketing channels. Which marketing campaigns have delighted you most this year? Let us know.
