Marketing is highly dynamic. Each year, new marketing trends to increase customer reach gain the spotlight as the technology and marketing tools evolve.

With the exponential rise in start-ups post the pandemic and the fierce competition for online attention, many companies today risk falling revenues unless they learn to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends, such as ensuring and increasing their customer reach. Big companies like Google understand the impact of AI-driven customer reach tools on marketing automation, service delivery, and customer experience, just to mention a few.

Other companies looking to maximize revenue and reduce costs should follow the lead and gather insights on the new trends in advertising and marketing for customer reach. In this article, we look into the meaning of customer reach and the latest trends savvy brands will use to increase customer reach in 2022.

What Is Customer Reach and How Is It Achieved?

According to Business2Community, customer reach is the process of increasing your brand’s visibility. It entails automated processes and strategies for businesses to reach their customers wherever they are. The customer reach is not just about reaching the general public. It’s also about targeting the largest number of interested customers possible.

There are several ways to achieve customer reach. Some of the strategies go way back but are persistently polished and advanced as they still bring results.

• Digital marketing. A business establishes its online presence with a website or social media or both. It then attracts customers to the website and finally converts them through an inbound marketing strategy.
• Content marketing entails the creation and distribution of high-quality and useful content.
• Email marketing refers to the use of emails to market a product or service
• Traditional advertising via TV commercials, radio, newspaper, business cards, direct mail, and other paper media
  

Why Is Customer Reach Important?

Customers are the most essential part of the business. Without them, the company would cease to exist. Big companies across the globe spend a fortune on customer reach despite the costs and risks involved. Why do they do that?

• To provide high-quality products and services. Businesses reaching out to customers invest in knowing who they are, what they want, and how they find their products. This helps them deliver top-quality products and services.
  

• To stay ahead of the competition. The company with the most customers always wins. Google, for example, has maintained a 92.47% of the market share in web search. Because of this, Google makes the most revenue compared to other search engines.
  

• To ensure customer loyalty. Customer churn is the metric that every business tries to decrease. After all, gaining and onboarding a new customer always costs the company more, and repeated sales and loyal customers are the foundation of any successful business. Reaching out to the existing customers is an important part of customer communication strategy and should be a well-thought and well-organized process.
  

• To maximize revenue. A business needs customers to make sales. Without sales, there can be no revenue. Therefore, reaching out to more customers enables the business to generate more revenue.

Current Trends in Customer Reach

Brand performance goes hand in hand with customer reach. However, each brand has a unique opinion about who its customers are. The current trends outlined below offer the most rewarding results at the moment and are projected to keep growing in the foreseeable future.

1. Digital Marketing Automation. Digital marketing is the art of using digital platforms to reach out to potential customers. It encompasses a wide range of activities from content creation to paid advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, and much more. Here are a few facts about digital marketing and why it’s worth a shot in 2022.
   

• According to Top Design Firms, 71% of small businesses in the US have a website;
• 44% of the businesses without a website intend to create one;
• Global digital advertising spending reached $378 billion in 2020;
• Digital marketing spend constitutes 46% of ad spending in 2021;
• Digital marketing growth rate stood at 11% compound annual growth between 2016 - 2021;
• In 2021, more than 9 out of 10 marketers planned on spending on mobile and online video;
• Organic search contributes to 53.3% of traffic;
• Technology and B2B companies generate twice as much revenue from organic search with the help of SEO (search engine optimization).
  

While it’s currently impossible to automate the entire digital marketing process due to its complexity and many creative components, there are plenty of customer data management, segmentation, targeting, and communication platforms that can be integrated with complementing tools for customer journey automation similar activities. Check out, for example, the sheer number of integrations available within Inkit, a Reach Enablement Platform providing APIs to autocomplete and verify customer addresses, deliver automated and personalized campaigns, and generate paperless documents at scale.

2. AI-Powered Digital Technologies. Artificial intelligence has been integrated into almost every aspect of human life. One impressive development is its advancement into the customer reach area. AI powers e-commerce tools, email marketing tools, customer service, content marketing, you name it. Today, AI-powered marketing tools analyze customer data such as browsing behavior, emailing, mobile app engagement, etc., to create personalized content for your customers.
   

Artificial intelligence has also reshaped e-commerce as we know it. Major e-commerce companies like Amazon use AI to study real-time customer data and buying behavior to make accurate product recommendations for their customers.

3. Automated Personalized Direct Mail Marketing. Direct Mail marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing. Having preserved its ‘personal touch’ if compared to email marketing and social media, it’s now a combination of automated customer reach--when print communications are sent based on real-time customer actions--and an art form. Many consumers admit to keeping well-designed or thought-provoking postcards as a memento.
   

Automation, customization, trigger-based send, and large-batch processing and delivery are a must, though, for today’s fast-paced and personalized customer communication strategies.

4. Smart Ads. Online shopping boomed during the pandemics, and it’s hardly the end of the remote shopping trend. While smart targeting is a must, Google’s self-learning smart ads are a growing advertising trend allowing businesses to tap into the data collected by the algorithm and continuously improve their targeting based on the latest results.

5. Multi-Device Search and Shopping Behavior. Mobile commerce refers to the use of mobile phones to buy and sell products online. Recent statistics reveal that mobile commerce sales are projected to hit $3.56 trillion by the end of 2021.
   

Here are some interesting statistics about mobile commerce.

• 53% of online shoppers use their smartphones for shopping;
• 79% of smartphone users have made online purchases within 6 months;
• 77% of window shoppers on mobile end up making impulse purchases.

These are the numbers driving this year’s ‘mobile-first’ SEO principle. While voice search remains within relevant future trends, it’s yet to become a prevailing search method.

2022 Trends That Will Impact Customer Reach

As we approach the coming year, digital marketers are already bracing for new upcoming marketing challenges. Here’s a list of the most promising digital marketing trends that will impact customer reach in 2022.

1. Content Automation with Artificial Intelligence. Content automation promises to eliminate manual processes in content generation, content management, and content sharing with the help of artificial intelligence. While it’s not yet a universal solution, more and more companies are trying out AI-empowered content generation tools to cover at least a part of their content needs.

2. Personalized Content Marketing. While personalization is not a new trend, however, the extent of personalization evolves year over year. Personalizing the messaging and content by buying persona is no longer considered enough--the future of personalization is a personalized customer experience for each consumer.

3. Video Marketing. Video marketing is a promising resource according to the 86% of businesses that use it to reach their customers. With the growth of popularity of video guides, video reviews, streaming, and video content making, such marketing channels as video content marketing and influencer video marketing are definitely something you need to consider to reach your customers in 2022.

4. Interactive Content and Gamification. Interactive content piques interest and engagement from users. Demand Metric reveals that interactive content generates double the conversions compared to passive content. Interactive games, polls, quizzes, and infographics are some of the tools used by marketers to drive engagement from users and gain an edge over the competition.

5. Mobile Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality (AR) combines computer-generated information with the physical world. There are over 800 million mobile AR users. Since early 2018, augmented reality has shown significant growth in revenue from $6.87 billion and is expected to grow to a stunning 26 billion in 2025.

Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform for Customer Reach in 2022

You’ve probably noticed the undercurrent of all of the trends discussed: basically, businesses are trying to genuinely reach more people in the fastest and most effective way. As always, it’s all about efficiency and the quality of customer communications.

Inkit’s Reach Enablement Platform offers just that: fast to implement and easy to integrate APIs that can help you automate and improve your key customer communications processes.

• Inkit Send to deliver automated customer communications at scale. Inkit Send integrates with your CRM and existing tools to automatically deliver direct mail and other types of printed customer communications based on specific actions or events.
  

• Inkit Render to generate paperless documents at scale. Inkit Render generates, manages, and secures PDFs and other paperless file formats. Whether you need to process one or one million documents, Inkit Render makes it possible with a simple API request.
  

• Inkit Verify to autocomplete and verify customer addresses. Inkit Verify works with checkout forms and websites to eliminate bad address data and improve customer experience.

Check out the pricing, select your plan, or contact us for a demo to ensure increased customer reach in 2022.