What do marketers view as important? How are they spending their budgets? What are their priorities?
The Canadian Association of Marketing Professionals (CAMP) recently joined forces with local digital marketing and analytics company, Ignite Digital, to launch the Marketers’ Outlook Survey to gain insights into the Canadian marketing landscape. Currently, while many insights and survey reports exist for North American marketers (and specifically US marketers), there are only a few that examine the Canadian industry, and so we were happy to delve into this research project.
We received insights from more than 200 marketing leaders from large, medium, and small companies, agencies both large and small, and marketing consultants. Our goal was to gain an understanding into the current trends facing marketers and how their priorities are shifting.
Here’s what we discovered:
1. Digital marketing continues to be a huge focus for marketers. Not surprisingly, most marketers list digital marketing as their number one priority for marketing efforts for this year and beyond.
a. 80% of marketers confidently believe that digital marketing influences their business strategy; and
b. 83% of companies plan to put more effort into digital marketing this year
2. For current digital efforts, social media ranked highest, followed by website, email and content. When asked about the digital marketing activities that respondents are currently engaged in, we found:
a. 83% of respondents indicated social media engagement
b. 80% indicated new website builds
c. 69% indicated email marketing and content marketing
3. Mobile Development did not rank high on our list. This was a little surprising, as we know mobile marketing to be an ongoing trend. However, it was a distant choice as compared with other marketing efforts.
a. Only 26% indicated they were currently involved in mobile application development; and
b. 38.7% of respondents believe that mobile application development contributes to their marketing success.
4. Traditional advertising did not rank well amongst our marketers. This is not ground-breaking, as traditional means such as radio and television advertising ranked extremely low. In fact, 0% of respondents indicated that television advertising would be a focus for them in 2016.
5. Digital is a huge focus, but traditional is still important.
a. Event marketing and print marketing are the top non-digital choices for marketers this year.
b. 22% of respondents expect their non-digital marketing budget to increase this year; and
c. 59% of marketers believe their non-digital budgets will stay the same this year.
d. Event/experiential/tradeshow marketing ranked higher (10.8%) than search engine marketing (9.8%) for marketers when ranking their priorities this year.
Content continues to gather steam, as marketers all agree that more of the focus this year will be on content. 78% of respondents agree that content creation, blogging, and overall content management contributes to their overall success, and content marketing ranked highest on the list of what marketers feel is the most important focus of 2016 (29%, compared to social media engagement, which was second at 19%). 42% of companies plan on making content a bigger priority this year.
And what are the biggest challenges facing marketers? They list their two biggest issues this year as equally split between staying up-to-date (staying relevant in a changing industry) and reporting return on investment (ROI) for marketing efforts (35 and 34.8% respectively).
What’s the bottom line? Digital continues to reign supreme, and content tops our list. Surprisingly, mobile app development is not a large focus, as many marketers prefer to put more of their budgets into website development, social media engagement, and content. Perhaps most telling is the continued focus on event marketing – many marketers still believe this to be a big priority for promotion.
For a free downloadable copy of the report, please visit Ignite Digital’s website: http://ignitedigital.ca/canadian-outlook-report-2016/.