Keep Calm and Budget On: 2017 Marketing Budget Trends

Every year, Target Marketing completes an extensive Media Usage Survey, asking readers how they’re allocating the budgets, what media they’re favoring and more. What follows is data from the first section of the 2017 survey, looking at marketing budget trends. The biggest takeaway in overall budget trends when we compare 2017 to 2016 is that the big picture hasn’t really changed at all.Each of these charts is nearly identical to what we saw last year, both for the total results and the revenue-level breakouts. The 2016 plan is continuing into 2017. Smaller marketers are remaining steady, with half of the budgets staying where they are, and 8 percent more planning to increase than decrease. The one change in this chart from last year just reaffirms how steady the trend is: Last year, 4 percent didn’t know what their budget was going to be; this year that’s down to 2 percent. Like last year, we see over 80 percent of mid-size marketers holding steady or increasing spending, and a full 40 percent increasing. And like the small businesses, these respondents saw “I don’t know” decrease by almost half (from 8 percent to 5 percent). Only 13 percent are decreasing budgets. For the second year, a majority of large business marketers say they’re increasing budgets. However, only 25 percent are holding steady while 20 percent are decreasing. Those numbers are all in line with last year. One thing is certain: Marketers in large companies are winning the boardroom budget battle. Budgets by Category For this question, we asked respondents what percentage of their budgets were going where, then calculated those out to one budget that represents the average spending pattern. Print is the biggest year-over-year change, falling from 29 percent in 2016 to 22 percent in 2017. Online marketing remains the top category. Despite 13 percent going to “other” this year, online marketing only fell by 1 percent compared to 2016. This year we also added an option for “Other” as well, which turned out to be a sizable percentage. Methodology Target Marketing conducted this survey in December 2016 by emailing a questionnaire to approximately 91,787 members of the audiences of Target Marketing magazine, as well as marketers subscribed to its sister magazines Total Retail and NonProfit Pro. This audience was further refined by suppressing list services firms and creative services/advertising agencies to produce a list that was comprised only of marketers. Three emails were sent between Dec. 9 and Dec. 15. Survey results are based on the participation of 725 respondents (for a response rate of 0.8 percent). Of the respondents to this year’s survey, 42 percent described their companies’ activities as B-to-B, 22 percent as B-to-C and 36 percent as Both. Respondents reported annual revenue as follows: greater than $100 million (10 percent); $51 to $100 million (7 percent); $5 to $50 million (22 percent); $1 million to $5 million (19 percent); less than $1 million (31 percent); and don’t know (11 percent). Chart totals may not equal 100 percent, due to rounding.

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Keep Calm and Budget On: 2017 Marketing Budget Trends

Thorin McGee

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Thorin McGee