B2B digital takes a bigger slice
After a tough year or two, when marketing spend has been challenged hard in most businesses it looks like B2B companies have made a big shift to digital marketing.
Whatever happened to total marketing spend, whether it went up, or down or stood still the evidence is that digital has taken a bigger slice of the pie.
This message came across very clearly in an interview based report B2B online: under the spotlight I produced a few months back with CVL (now Transform) which included the observation from participants that “the job for B2B eMarketing teams is to…maximise the return on investment, continue to innovate and take best practice from wherever it exists in order to deliver on the promise.“
I’ve just been taking another look at what’s happening in B2B digital and I see that Forrester are bullish about the trend; they say B2B digital marketing spend will double to $4.8bn in 2014, as digital grabs a bigger slice of the marketing pie.
They go on to say; “B2B marketers will continue to invest heavily in paid search but will also begin to invest in display advertising and emerging marketing tactics such as social and mobile marketing…B2B marketers should focus on creating online customer interactions – not just driving leads“.
I was with the Heads of eCommerce for two of the UK’s big B2B companies today and sure enough they weren’t talking about struggling to get board attention and funding, they were talking about how best to invest their digital marketing budgets and how to track the return on investment. incidentally we did spend some time talking about how to use social media in the B2B world and I’d like to come back to that in another blog update because it’s very topical and there is some good stuff going on.
