Get with the program :: Why marketing is going online

If you haven’t read this yet, Clash-Media published the latest figures on marketing spend. And you guessed it… online marketing is growing rapidly.

“More than 50 per cent of an average marketer's budget is now spent online, new research has claimed.

It found more than 70 per cent of companies use search engine optimisation, paid search and email marketing and offline marketing is falling.

The study, which was carried out by e-Consultancy for Clash Media, a lead generation organisation, showed only press and television marketing have also increased.

"Organisations have lessened their use of marketing methods such as postal, telephone and radio, in favour of online methods," commented Luke Pursey, UK managing director, Clash Media.”

Raise your hand if you’re surprised…

Interestingly though, there are some other figures to come out of the report are also noteworthy.

Marketers view SEO as better value than PPC however dollars spent on SEO have decreased by 3% from the previous period. Probably because of people like Netregistry sell SEO for far cheaper than it used to be even a year ago, making it more accessible to more people. Increased competition for an SEO company has also proliferated, with more and more companies and web-designers, offering the service. Unfortunately the IT game is fairly unprofessional as an industry. Just about anyone (with or without experience) can claim to be an SEO expert, most tradespeople have to have a license.

Still, in house email marketing is still the most commonly used online method for lead generation. It’s cheap, and sending a newsletter to a group of people on your database is a fairly trivial job even for the most technically challenged marketer.

Finally, the results overwhelmingly indicate that people who use online don’t really consider themselves able to track the effectiveness. An absolute shame, considering that online marketing is far easier to track than any other method of marketing.

As you can imagine, these figures are only going to increase as more people realise that most methods of traditional marketing accessible to small businesses are the metaphorical online equilavent of dropping flyers from a blimp, hoping that they'll hit someone interested in what you do.