What are Companies Currently Budgeting?
SEO and social media marketing currently make up 70% of online marketing budgets. Overall, 24% of budgets were spent on digital marketing in 2011. Although the percentage of budgets that include online marketing tactics increase every year, 28% of organizations are in the process of moving their marketing budgets to digital channels.
A Focus Towards Online
It makes sense that organizations are starting to reshift their marketing budgets to the online world based on what today’s consumers are spending their time doing online. 35% of today’s consumers spend 180 minutes or more (3 hours) online per day. The activities they do the most are check emails (94%), search (87%) and research products (78%). If businesses have not already capitalized on this, they should be moving their focus online to where consumers are spending their time and actively searching and researching products to acquire them while in the buying cycle.
Social Media
When social media first came onto the marketing landscape the natural question from ROI-eccentric marketers was “What’s the ROI?”. When polled, 57% of companies that used social media in 2011 named their company blog as the source for generating the most customers. 57% also named LinkedIn as generating the most business for their companies. 48% named Twitter, and 42% named Facebook.
Mobile Marketing
In 2012, 75% of marketers plan to include mobile in their budgets. Why? By 2013 it is predicted that over 60 Million North Americans will be smart phone users. This isn’t a surprise that so many will use smart phones but what organizations should be taking note of is the new technology smart phones will include, more specifically the iPhone 5.
The next generation of smart phones will include Near Field Communication (NFC) which allows for simplified transactions, data exchange and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity. It is a technology that is expected to become a widely used system for making payments directly from a smart phone, eliminating the need to pull out a credit or debit card each time a consumer wishes to make a transaction. Google Wallet was recently released which turns smart phones into a virtual credit card, but at this time, only works on the Sprint Nexus 4G. Long story short, marketers need to start thinking about how they will use mobile marketing tactics to benefit from this technology to ultimately generate more sales online.
