Online marketing – especially content and social media marketing – has been seeing tremendous growth in the last few years. Businesses are finally giving social media and content marketing the due respect they deserve and are incorporating it in their overall marketing strategies. Online marketing is no longer a one time activity done on the fly! More and more companies are joining the online marketing bandwagon because they have seen how successful and cost effective it can be. 2012 was the year of content marketing when surveys showed that a large number of companies were expanding their content marketing budgets and creating and publishing more content online.
This year is no different. A recent survey conducted by Econsultancy and Responsys shows that companies will continue to expand their digital marketing budgets in 2013. The 2013 report on marketing budgets published by them also shows that most companies will be focusing on content marketing over other forms of online marketing.
Content marketing gets the largest share of the pie
71% of survey respondents confirmed that they would be increasing their digital marketing budgets in 2013 as compared to 68% last year. Moreover, 70% of companies surveyed said that they would be increasing their content marketing budgets this year. This makes content marketing the most preferred digital marketing channel of 2013 with search engine optimization (65%) and email marketing (65%) rounding off the top three digital marketing channels whose budgets will increase this year.
Surprisingly, investment for social media marketing took fourth place with 62% of the companies surveyed saying that they will increase their social media marketing budgets this year. On a more disturbing note, only half of the companies surveyed said that they had a good understanding of ROI from digital marketing. This is a huge fall from last year when 55% of respondents claimed that they had a good understanding of ROI from digital marketing. 18% of the companies surveyed admitted that their knowledge about ROI was poor to very poor. This shows that even though companies are willing to spend more on digital marketing, they will have to hire external experts to help them analyze and improve their digital marketing campaigns.
Revenues from digital marketing on the rise
There is a reason why companies want to increase their digital marketing budgets. According to this report, 70% of the responding companies obtain around 50% of their overall revenues from digital marketing efforts. More importantly, about 18% of the respondents revealed that more than 70% of their total revenues were derived from digital marketing spend. This shows that there is no excuse for companies to only stick to traditional forms of marketing. If they want to increase sales they will have to pay more attention to digital marketing.