40.8% of marketers will raise their marketing spend in 2012 – but in what area?

Despite being plagued by continued anguish and global turmoil, 40.8 per cent of b2b companies will boost their marketing budgets this year according to a survey from BtoB’s “2012 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans”.

In addition to the 40.8 per cent increasing, 48.4 per cent will keep their budgets flat this year and only 10.8 per cent will cut back.

It is not surprising that this year will see the biggest investment in online marketing, with 74 per cent of marketers increasing their online spending.

Eduardo Conrado, senior VPCMO at Motorola Solutions claimed ‘around the world, we are seeing more traffic coming in to all of our websites via smartphones, so we’re enabling our Web platforms to be mobile-enabled, to allow smartphones to have a richer experience’.

The top online spending areas this year will be websites (67.6 per cent), email (67.5 per cent), social media (64.3 per cent), search (54.8 per cent), video (50.5 per cent) and webcasts/virtual events (45.6 per cent).

Currently, 70.3 per cent of marketers are using social media as part of their marketing strategy according to BtoB’s survey. The top applications for social media are brand-building (82.6 per cent), lead generation (51.4 per cent), thought leadership (47.4 per cent) and customer feedback (39.5 per cent).

Interestingly, the survey also revealed that 41.4 per cent of marketers will raise their event spending, 36.5 per cent will increase direct mail and 20.1 per cent will boost print advertising. These percentages indicate that while companies are investing heavily in online marketing, they are planning a return to traditional marketing – utilising the benefits of having a presence in both.

Tom Haas, CMO at Siemens Corp confirmed this by stating ‘A few years ago, we pulled back somewhat from print to put more in online…we find that print works really well to drive people to our website, so we will continue to use print’.

In contrast to this however, 22.4 per cent of marketers plan to cut back on their print advertising, 13.4 per cent will reduce their spend on direct mail and 12.1 per cent will decrease event marketing spending. While reasons for making such decisions differ for every company, I can confirm that Conversis is not one of the 22.4 per cent.

We are however, among the 70.3 per cent using social media, the 41.4 per cent who are raising their event spending and the 20.1 per cent will boost print advertising.

So, which percentages does your company fall into?

Read more:

BtoB, Outlook 2012, January 2012

1commentComment on this article