2021 is behind us and if you’re anything like FieldTest, you’re ready to make big moves and get a fresh start in the new year!

You may have noticed that we’ve gone through some huge changes in the last few weeks, but you don’t have to rebrand in order to make 2022 your best sales year ever.

While it may be true that the last two years have been tumultuous, eCommerce has continued to grow despite it all and the advertising world has kept up pace along with it. Many experts predict that this year will set a high water mark for ad revenue and eCommerce sales, showing that not only is the industry recovering - it is thriving.  With that in mind, we decided to put together all of the wisdom we’ve accumulated over the years and give you a one-stop guide for everything you need to increase sales and scale your business in the first months of the new year. Every year provides a new opportunity to make moves but this one is particularly fertile ground for brands ready to invest in growth.

Ready to get started? Let’s grow your brand in 2022.

Step 1: Get a fresh start with your creative

Sometimes a creative refresh is just the thing your brand needs to get your campaigns performing their absolute best. This is especially true in the new year.

Let’s start at the top with your ad creative. One of the best ways to keep your marketing current and engaging in the new year is to refresh your ad imagery and headline copy.

When building relationships with your customers it’s important for your messaging to feel fresh, timely, and relevant. Your customers are smart and engaged with your content, keeping your ads updated regularly is a great way to make sure you hold their attention.

One of the best things about the new year for marketers is that it is one of the most universally celebrated holidays around, making it a great opportunity to speak to the motivations and feelings we all share at this time of the year. Whether you’re in the market for a new pair of shoes or a new CBD face cream, we’re all turning the page on the bygone year and looking for a fresh start - developing some ads that message to that is a great place to start with your Q1 marketing refresh. Remember: you are developing relationships with your customers that could last a lifetime, make sure you start on the right foot by marketing to them with ads that are personal, timely and relevant.

Of course just because we are in a new year doesn’t mean you have to leave last year in the dust, and you shouldn’t go into a creative refresh completely blind. Marketing is all about building - building relationships, building a successful funnel, building a brand that resonates with customers and scales - so a great place to start with new creatives is to look at what worked last year and , you guessed it, build on your successes!

Maybe you had a social campaign promoting a new product that ended up selling out, maybe a particular search term took the lions share of clicks, maybe you got a big piece of earned media and want everyone to know. Success looks a little different for every brand, but looking back and taking inventory of last year’s successes is a great place to start when deciding where to grow from here.

Go ahead and pat yourself on the back, you did great last year, but the important thing is to take whatever those wins were and build on them to make something new, compelling, and relevant in the new year. 

Step 2: Utilize all of the tools at your disposal

Now that we’ve refreshed your creative let’s start to think about things you can do on the back end to make 2022 your best year ever.

There’s more to brand growth in the new year than just creating some new ads and it’s important that your brand, your operations, and your offerings are developing along with your marketing. These last couple years have been very exciting for eCommerce and there are a whole host of new products and ways of thinking about digital marketing that you should be considering if you want to grow your brand in the new year.

One thing you’ll come to understand the longer you participate in the digital marketing space is the power of data to drive performance in your campaigns. Every move you make will be driven by data in one way or another, and your creative is no different.  

Data driven creative

Data driven creative is something you will be hearing about more and more. As brands look to connect with new groups of people without using Personal Identifiable Information like email addresses or their name, using data driven creative allows you to be polite without sacrificing campaign effectiveness.

Many marketers believe that the trick to marketing is simply using the right algorithms to connect the ad campaigns to the audiences. However, most performance marketers tend to focus on targeting specific audiences and often overlook the creative and personal elements of ad campaigns that actually connect people to brands on an emotional level and drive real engagement.

More than just a chance to create an emotional connection, Data Driven Creative allows marketers the chance to ensure that their marketing is relevant to the customer’s needs and personal circumstances.

Here's an example:

Consider you're a clothing store that sells both warm weather and cold weather apparel. By targeting ads to different areas and specifically leveraging the current temperature data point of where the person seeing the ads is located, you can make sure that short sleeve shirts are being shown to people in Southern California in March, while items like jackets and knit hats can be delivered to folks who are still dealing with the last few weeks of winter.

It may seem obvious that marketing and creative teams should work together but a surprising number of agencies and brands have siloed their operations between creative, media buying and performance marketing teams. Breaking down these silos is one of the hottest new trends in digital marketing, and it’s working. The Data Driven Creative approach has proven to increase engagement, sales and brand loyalty. In 20022 successful brands and agencies will be asking; how can we use data to optimize creativity and personal connection in the same way we optimize behavioral targeting and budgeting?

Contextual intelligence

Much like data driven creative, contextual intelligence is an emerging trend that allows you to maximize your digital ad spend without infringing on PII or other privacy related concerns that the ad industry is continuing to move away from.

Contextual intelligence is focused on understanding the ebbs and flow of the popularity around content topics and determining when to spend more on a certain content vertical and when to pull back.

It works like this: Content engagement over time is determined by analyzing the volume of ad s delivered within any given context segment. When content is published and engaged with online, it is categorized into segments based on its context, which is determined by algorithmically analyzing all the words that appear on the page and their relationship with each other. More people engaging with content results in a higher volume of categorizations and ad calls. This data can be used for extremely accurate forecasting when planning advertising campaigns, as it reveals how often consumers engage with this categorized content.

Oracle recently released a report on contextual intelligence and they offer several great examples to help bring this point home for those looking to strategize better here this year. One of the best possible examples is when they show this accompanying graph giving insight into when people are interacting with travel content: For brands that see travel content as being vital in reaching their key demographic, knowing when to spend more and (just as important) when to step off the gas is going to significantly optimize campaign performance and make their ad budgets work much harder for them.

Like Data Driven Creative, Contextual Intelligence takes information that brands have long had access to and utilizes it creatively in order to optimize your marketing budget and make sure you get the best performance for your advertising dollar. As eCommerce continues to develop and evolve, this trend towards creative use of audience data will only accelerate.

How will your brand use data to grow this year?

Step 3: Anticipate upcoming challenges

2022 won’t be easy for digital marketers, but we're here to help you anticipate some of the biggest challenges so you’ll be well prepared to tackle them.

Just like any year, 2022 will pose challenges for digital marketers. FieldTest is all about putting you in control and giving you the information you need to succeed, and this year will be no different. Let’s go through some of the major issues we foresee in the upcoming year and beyond, as well as how you can make sure you are well prepared to take these challenges head on and come out on top.

What exactly is happening with the cookie?

If you've been in the marketing game for a while you've likely heard a lot of to-do about the death of the cookie. Heck, we've even written blog articles about it. It's true that the era of the cookie is coming to an end, and many marketers worry that along with it so will end the era of truly transparent multi-touch attribution (if that's a new term to you check out our blog on attribution models. It's not as confusing as it may sound, we promise). It's true that the cookie is a major force behind the favored attribution model of many marketers, but it's important to remember that it's not the only one!

If you follow the digital marketing industry, or even the FieldTest blog, you’ll know what the last advertised solution to the end of the cookie was - The FLoC. These anonymized groupings allowed Google to essentially create a sort of semi-cookie. Yes, they would still be tracking users behavior patterns online, but they would be doing so anonymously and while lumping consumers together into broad groupings, no longer singled out by their own personal browsing patterns.

This model was met with pushback from marketers and consumers alike, is an anonymous grouping really that much of an improvement over a semi-anonymous individual tracking model? Is this type of grouping even accurate when forecasting consumer behavior? Google apparently took these questions to heart this year when they backed down off of the FLoC concept and introduced a new system of tracking based on certain interest groups of “Topics”, with plans to implement this by 2023.

What does this all mean for your marketing? A few things.

First, it means that you’ll have to have a forward-looking strategy this year as we move towards an uncertain future in digital marketing attribution. As ability to micro-target based on interest becomes more and more difficult you’ll need to begin to migrate to other models like the ones we mentioned above. It also means that the importance of a personal connection with customers will only increase. Building relationships with your customers should always be the goal of a savvy digital marketer, and as your customer becomes more and more anonymized it will be increasingly important to make sure that your customers are seen, heard, and spoken to in a way that still feels personal.

Cracks are appearing in Facebook's armor

Facebook has been a controversial brand lately, to say the least. Whether it's being embroiled in international money laundering scandals, revealing that they have been lying to advertisers with inflated numbers and phony metrics, or having whistleblowers come forward about some pretty devious behavioral patterns they knowingly optimize towards with their users, it seems like something is always keeping Facebook in the headlines - and not for reasons they'd probably prefer.

These are far from the only issues with the world's foremost social platform; there's another reason our clients often come to us frustrated with Facebook - they've run dry on inventory. Most brands are running some kind of marketing campaign on Facebook, that's simply the state of the industry, and there's no shame in it. The efficacy of social media marketing is clear to anyone who signs up for a paid campaign on these platforms: A captive audience feeding data directly into a proprietary system allowing you to essentially use your marketing to shoot fish in a barrel, or at least that’s how Facebook markets themselves. Inevitably, however, the truth comes to light - that barrel can often be very shallow and filled with fake fish. Ok, that’s enough of this fish in a barrel metaphor.

In all seriousness, many clients come to us frustrated that they have seemingly reached the bottom of the well with their Facebook engagement and find their campaigns performing worse and worse while their marketing costs go higher and higher (some of our clients have reported their ad costs doubling within the last year alone). This is to say nothing of the major adjacency issues you encounter on Facebook. Many marketers express frustration that their teams put their best efforts into ad campaigns only to be delivered next to a misinfo bot or someone arguing with their second cousin over some inscrutable and irreconcilable issue. Not the best environment for building real relationships with your customers. Flee to Instagram and you run into the same issues of limited inventory and an even more acute rise in marketing costs.

What’s the solution? Simple, we must move away from the current model of digital marketing existing exclusively on the walled gardens of social media. Studies have shown that only 35% of internet use occurs on these walled gardens, why allow 100% of your marketing to take place there?

By expanding your marketing to include the open web you not only gain access to the other ~65% of online traffic that does not occur on social media, you also gain access to a more robust - and more transparent - dataset of your consumer behavior, allowing you to mae smart decisions about the future of your marketing. Why rely solely on Facebook for insights into how your customers think and act when you can take charge of your marketing and utilize your own first-party data to fuel marketing performance?

In 2022 successful brands will know how to leverage both social media and open web advertising to create full-funnel campaigns that connect with their customers wherever they are online. FieldTest has made buying ads on your customer’s favorite websites as simple as Facebook made buying ads within their environment, and our costs are lower and more consistent.

2022 can be your best year ever, with help from FieldTest

It’s no secret that the world has gone through a tough few years, but eCommerce growth has remained strong

Every new year offers brands a unique opportunity to refresh their marketing, build on their successes and strive to achieve new ones. 2022 will be the third straight year of record breaking eCommerce growth, meaning the iron has never been hotter for brands to strike. With a newly refreshed set of creatives, a new set of data tools and some out of the box thinking, you can make this your best sales year ever.

FieldTest has gone through some changes of our own recently, but one thing that will not change is our dedication to empowering digital brands. Our goal is to give brands the tools they need to take control of their marketing and fuel their growth. In the new year and beyond, fieldtest will be here to make it all possible.

Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can help you make 2022 your brand’s best year ever.