COVID-19 changed society and has led to a great intensification in digitalisation and online marketing. Therefore it is essential to adapt to the best digital tools that satisfy the needs of B2C or B2B customers. The basics of digital marketing remain the same: increasing the chances of online contact, sales, repeat purchases (loyalty) and recommendations.
However, the online media are always evolving to ensure the best possible presence and promotion of our products and services to consumers. Continuous improvement is essential and here are the main new trends in Digital Marketing in Spain for 2022:
1. Voice search 
The use of voice search is gradually increasing, both out of necessity, as it is easier for children and the elderly, and for convenience for the rest of us, as it is quicker to speak than to write. Voice search is defined as someone speaking to the search engine instead of typing. We can see this with the boom of Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri as more and more applications allow the use of the voice assistant1.
One of the challenges of SEO and technology is to correctly capture what you want to say in order not to miss opportunities. By doing a laborious job of clarifying commands such as “turn on the lights” to a proper search for “what is the nearest restaurant” where we want it to crawl the web and find an answer.
2. Chatbots 
In terms of written interaction, the use of virtual assistants is emerging strongly. It is one of the most cutting-edge but also most expensive strategies providing instant messaging to chat in real time. This requires artificial intelligence with a minimum of quality and speed as it deals directly with the consumer and can lose many purchasing or loyalty options.
In return, it reduces customer service costs and allows a 24/7 service to resolve problems or doubts at any time. The most commonly used chatbots are ITR (“Dumb Chatbots”), “Smart Chatbots” and “Word-spotting”. ITR chatbots are chatbots that have a predefined response structure but do not interpret the user’s answers.
While “Word-spotting” chatbots work by keywords and are more flexible in the search but also give pre-defined answers like ITR chatbots. Smart Chatbots use artificial intelligence and machine learning to process language and provide personalised responses. A list of this year’s best spanish chatbots has recently been published2.
3. Influencer Marketing 
Social influencers have always been a strong point for marketing. In this case, the platforms where this influence is carried out have evolved to market with influencers. Traditionally, the chosen celebrities came from sport, cinema or television, but nowadays we find them mainly on social networks such as Youtube, Instagram or Twitch.
What they say, wear or do has an impact on a large number of followers and has a viral impact. So they are very important for brands and their visibility. The risk is that we must ensure that the person chosen will be in line with the values of the company being advertised. There have been scandals that would have endangered the reputation of the brand3.
4. Visual search 
This is one of the options most used by consumers on the Internet. The navigation is done through images of products and services. It is a very intuitive, fast and satisfactory search, which is why it is always very successful among customers. There are three different types of visual search: keyword search, reverse search or detailed search.
In the keyword search the user enters the terms he/she wants and the search engine offers a series of related images. In the reverse search, we enter an image directly and the search engine brings us other images similar to the one we have entered. And the detailed search where we can select different objects in the same image.
All of this requires the products to be always up to date, taking care of their detail and quality of visualisation. This is one of the keys to the success of giants such as Amazon, Apple and Ikea, and Google has an application exclusively dedicated to this4.
5. Video Marketing 
The audiovisual format has always been the most powerful for capturing the attention of users. Cinema and television have always been the kings of entertainment and in this case what we are experiencing is an evolution of the platforms where video content is reproduced. Mainly Youtube, but more and more websites and applications are inserting Video Marketing ads to entertain and sell to customers.
It is a costly content to produce but very powerful to attract new consumers and encourage repeat purchases. Moreover, it is not necessary to focus only on advertising, as it is a powerful means of generating content and achieving other objectives at the level of social awareness, product demonstrations, events or testimonials. To get a better idea, here are the ten best spanish visual marketing videos of recent times.5
Summary
As you can see, digital marketing offers many options for solving customer problems. In this changing environment, we need to keep up with the latest developments, so we recommend testing these new trends as much as possible and measuring how successful they are with customers.
1. Key statistics for voice search in 2021: https://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/trends-in-voice-search/
2. https://blog.smartcommerce21.com/los-mejores-chatbots-en-espanol
3. https://www.businessinsider.es/escandalos-sonados-influencers-espanoles-2020-776173
4. https://www.revistagq.com/noticias/articulo/google-search-on-lens-novedades
5. https://www.cyberclick.es/numerical-blog/las-campanas-de-video-marketing-mas-impactantes-del-verano