OPINION: The 22 biggest marketing buzzwords of 2022 explained

Written by Lis Anderson, director, www.ambitiouspr.co.uk 

Hyper-personalisation, business to human (B2H) and brandsplaining have all become popular marketing and PR buzzwords to watch out for this year.

This should come as no surprise. We’ve seen huge shifts in demand from customers towards brands and consequently, the trend is for a more down-to-earth, human-oriented approach to marketing. One which approaches them as people rather than consumers.

Technology has also transformed our home and working lives with even more of our time being spent online. New tools and communication platforms are emerging constantly.

For a finance brand, traversing this ever-changing landscape means that you have to be quick to take on board these trends. It’s about making your brand story fit new conversations and the current zeitgeist as well as new channels.

But not only have our communication methods changed, the language and terminology used by PR and marketers has quickly changed too.

Resultingly there has been an influx of buzzwords that are going to be key for this year. Here are 22 buzzwords, new and old, that you should know this year:

Top marketing and PR buzzwords for 2022 

1. Hybrid B2B: conducting e-commerce by merging strategies for both B2B and B2C, and then using the merged strategies for both B2B and B2C.
2. B2H: refers to increased use of a more people-oriented marketing approach (relevant terms also include humaning).
3. Hyperpersonalisation: very advanced methods used by brands to tailor their marketing to individual customers (often through the use of data, AI and automation to create custom and targeted experiences).
4. Newsjacking: taking advantage of current events/news to advertise your own product/brand.
5. Brand fostering: handling of a brand or portfolio of brands to a third party.
6. Freemium: pricing structure with a free (but limited) service, which ideally entices customers towards purchasing the full experience.
7. Content hub: centralised online destination containing curated content around a specific topic.
8. Brandsplaining: condescending and/or inaccurate explanation of a brand towards its customers.
9. App fatigue: refers to growing dissatisfaction expressed by customers towards single-service apps (mainly mobile, but could extend to all online platforms).
10. Content market system (CMS): creating, managing and customising customers’ digital experience.
11. Streamline: employ simpler and faster methods to discover prospects and develop relationships with them through customised content (which will convert leads into customers and brand advocates).
12. Brand value: monetary worth of your brand.
13. Pivot: signal an oncoming change.
14. OASIS method: objective, audience/insight, strategy/ideas, implementation, scoring/evaluation (used for planned communications and campaigns).
15. Customer experience (CX): customers’ perception of the experience of a brand.
16. Return on investment (ROI): measures organic revenue from SEO campaigns against the cost of producing them.
17. Domain authority: the measure of a website’s relevance for a specific subject area (measures how authoritative or trustworthy the website is compared to others like it).
18. Data quality: indicates how reliable a given dataset is (which is important as it allows organisations to make informed decisions regarding their campaigns and budgets quickly).
19. Customer lifetime value (LTV): a measure of the total worth of a customer to a business over the duration of their relationship (this should be high compared to customer acquisition costs*).
20. *Customer acquisition costs (CAC): total cost of acquiring a customer.
21. Customer relationship management (CRM): systems used by businesses to track and then optimise their relationships and interactions with customers.
22. User-generated content (UGC): content created by others outside of your business but about your business.

It will be interesting to see which words become engrained into our everyday language.

The only certainty is that the pace of change that we’ve been seeing in the industry shows no sign of decline. It’s likely that we’ll see another host of new marketing buzzwords as we enter 2023.

Credit: RapidEye