BY Kathy Crosett
Are your clients having trouble staying up to date with the most effective digital marketing formats? It’s not easy to keep up with the latest tech-based changes in digital. After all, your clients' expertise is running their businesses. That's why they’re relying on outside experts to help them with their advertising and marketing challenges and figuring out where to increase their digital marketing spend. In fact, up to 82% of marketers currently outsource their digital marketing projects.
In their recent survey of over 278 marketing professionals, Ascend2 analysts report that business owners believe in the power of digital formats and may be willing to increase their digital marketing spend. Only 13% of these business owners noted that traditional media formats are more effective than digital ones. All of the other respondents said that digital marketing was either somewhat or significantly more effective than traditional.
The top two 2020 marketing goals reported by business owners in this survey are:
- Increasing sales leads generated 54%
- Increasing customer acquisition 49%
Unfortunately, 48% of marketing pros say they face significant challenges in reaching these goals. Marketers also hope to increase customer engagement (43%), improve brand awareness (38%) and improve their customer experience (33%). These challenges may be what’s leading marketers to outsource their digital marketing projects.
Where Digital Marketing Spend is Increasing
Going forward, you can expect your clients to show a lot of interest (and an increase in digital marketing spend) in the formats they believe are most effective at reaching their target customers. This includes search engine optimization (49%) and social media/blog posting (47%). Both of these initiatives are difficult for marketers to manage internally. They’ll also be looking at search and social ads (43%) and personalization/content (43%).
We’ve heard a lot about the importance of video content in modern-day marketing. The Ascend2 survey reveals that only 33% of marketers consider the format to be effective. Interestingly, a recent Vidyard survey on B2B video content found that only 28% of operators felt video was delivering a return on investment.
Measuring Success
We can expect business owners to scrutinize the success of their digital campaigns. With more tools touting the ability to measure outcomes, business owners say the following metrics work best to determine how well campaigns are going:
- Cost per customer acquired 50%
- Conversion rate 46%
- Engagement 45%
- Campaign ROI 37%
- Cost per lead generated 35%
- Channel-specific traffic 16%
We have come a long way from simply measuring traffic or exposure with regard to digital marketing efforts. At the same time, rolling out and measuring the return on the digital marketing spend of these campaigns has been challenging. Those challenges likely explain why 11% of marketers completely outsource their needs. Another 71% outsource digital marketing projects as needed.
Talk with your clients about their 2020 digital marketing plans. Give them a snapshot of their current position by running a digital audit on them. The tool is available on AdMall by SalesFuel. And then propose to help them with their most difficult projects.