In a September 2008 report, Marketing Sherpa reported that about 50% of companies surveyed expect to increase their budgets for email marketing and social media marketing. Additionally, 83% expect to decrease their radio and TV advertising, and 60% will decrease print advertising. Here is the chart from the Marketing Sherpa Report:
This chart also indicates, for instance, that of the 382 marketing managers that Marketing Sherpa polled in September, 20% said they would be decreasing their spending on social networks, which they call “Web 2.0″, and 48% of marketers would be increasing spending on social networks. Presumably, the remainder of the marketers ( 32% ) reported “no change”. ( We’ll ignore for a moment the erroneous conflation of social networks with Web 2.0. )
The research isn’t really surprising if you’ve been paying attention to online marketing for the last few years, but it does indicate that the shift from offline to online marketing is continuing.
For apparel vendors, this research has a few specific lessons:
- If you don’t have plans for email marketing, start now. There is a simple reason for the planned increase in email marketing: it works.
- Conference and trade shows – “Event Marketing” " has long been unpopular but considered mandatory. That seems to be changing, and it may be that we’ll see a significant decline in conference attendance in the next year. Perhaps the decline already began when Quicksilver pulled out of the Action Sports Retailer trade show.
- Social networks are getting more interesting. Social networks still don’t generate much traffic to corporate websites, but they are becoming much more popular for connecting with customers. Does your store have a Facebook page?
ExtactTarget turned us on to the chart in a post on January 12. That post has additional analysis for what this data means specifically for email.
