Curb Your Enthusiasm
Is investment in online marketing growing the way it once did? Probably not, judging from Direct’s 2007 online marketing survey.
Fewer DMers are planning large spending increases this time around, and more seem to be embracing a wait-and-see attitude.
Yet there’s no doubt that the Web is a major component of almost every firm’s media mix. Despite the slowdown in growth, traditional marketing budgets are declining while online ones are on the rise.
Business-to-business firms are the most likely to be ramping up. And why not? A growing number find that online marketing is more profitable than offline, our poll shows.
Not that consumer marketers are losing money online. But the number calling it the most profitable channel dropped this year.
Meanwhile, the percentage of overall sales generated online is holding steady for most companies. It’s slightly over one-third for consumer marketers, almost a fifth for B-to-B companies and around a quarter overall.
Why has investment growth slowed?
Here’s one theory.
Consumer marketers rely mostly on e-mail to drive prospects to their Web sites. But B-to-B marketers tend to use direct mail, a medium recently hit by postal rate hikes.
In contrast, consumer marketers are quicker to invest in optimizing their Web sites, a strategy that brings prospects in through natural search queries. They’re also spending on pay-per-click keywords
