Where the Money’s Going: 2017 Spending 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 second section of the 2017 survey, looking at spending trends. 5 Winners and Losers of the Channel Spending Trends 1. Online Advertising: Although 46 percent are still increasing budgets on it, online marketing fared markedly worse in the 2017 survey compared to 2016: 20 percent report they’re not using online ads, and the 46 percent increasing is actually 8 percent lower than last year’s number (54 percent). 2. DR Space Advertising: It’s rare for any channel to have a double-digit decrease rate in our survey. Direct mail did for a while, but that was when direct mail was coming down from a very high peak. This year, space advertising is coming down, but the percent of marketers increasing that spending is actually up from 11 percent last year, and the number of marketers who said they don’t use it at all fell from 47 percent to 38 percent. It’s a volatile channel, but still heavily in use. 3. Email: Email never takes a year off. This year, 96 percent of respondents are using email marketing to some extent, and over 60 percent are increasing budgets this year — which is even higher than 2016’s 49 percent increase. Only 2 percent are decreasing their email budgets. That’s a high vote of confidence in a channel that sometimes seems to be waiting to pass its torch. 4. Social Media: More than half of marketers said they were increasing their budgets for social media advertising and engagement efforts. Social media has been a topic for a long time, but the Media Usage Survey budget numbers really shot up in 2016. This year’s numbers are markedly higher than that, and there are fewer marketers not spending on these channels than any other channel except email. Most years, the only channels that might have numbers this high are email and search engine optimization. It took a while, but social media has arrived as a mainstream marketing channel. 5. TV: As far as our surveyed audience is concerned, TV is dead. Whether it’s the infomercial or traditional commercials, over 80 percent of respondents are not using the traditional channel for video advertising. 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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Where the Money’s Going: 2017 Spending Trends

5 Winners and Losers of the Channel Spending Trends

Thorin McGee

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5 Winners and Losers of the Channel Spending Trends

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Thorin McGee