Fresh off the Press Digital Marketing Stats

So I realize the irony in this article's title, since digital marketing is usually not printed.  But it sounded cool.

Well, the reason for this post is that I have just been reading through the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report as published recently by Webmarketing123 from a survey of 500 B2B and B2C marketing professionals during August and September of this year. And it's fascinating. Click here to view the summarized infographic of the report, or read on where I will both summarize and provide my insights into these latest findings.

The report focused its survey questions on three main digital marketing areas: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Social Media. The very first statistic showed that for B2B companies, their biggest impact from digital marketing has been with SEO, while B2C companies are fairly evenly distributed across all three areas. It goes on to state that most companies are going to be increasing their digital marketing budgets for next year, with the biggest increase happening in Social Media management, where currently a significant majority of the companies surveyed are handling it in house. As the importance of Social Media increases, I believe that marketers like myself will become increasingly more in demand, as long as we keep up with the changes and can prove our value.

Since I'm a big fan of having objectives, the next graphic in the report was of keen interest to me, where it showed that both B2B and B2C companies have almost the same order of priorities for their online marketing:

1. Generate Sales
2. Generate Leads
3. Generate Site Traffic
4. Build Brand Awareness
5. Build Online Community

I myself put generating leads above generating sales, since usually you need leads first to close sales, and so sure enough one of the next items in the report highlighted the percentage of leads generated from each area. Facebook at 47% just edged out LinkedIn at 34.8% and Twitter at 33.8%, which of course leaves 31.6% of respondents stating that they have never generated leads from digital marketing. I'm guessing those 31 percent probably just don't have the right digital marketing plans in place, and hopefully will be revamping their strategies for next year.

The last statistic presented in the report asked the participants which topic they wished to learn more about, and the interesting thing is that although most did want to learn more about SEO, PPC and Social Media, the biggest response was learning overall cross-promotional digital strategies. And that is great news, because that is really what it is all about, understanding that big picture of what your overall Web Presence is and how to most effectively present your story to your target audiences.

If you would like a copy of the full report, please contact me at Ken@WebptOh.com or leave feedback.