I’m sure everyone reads every bit of research that comes out nowadays (I mean, why not. It’s all so riveting). However, I think if you’re going to take on the numbing task of reading a research report, you should consider the Interactive Marketing Forecast released by Forrester.
Forrester asserts that by 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing — as much as they do on television today. Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 35% of all advertising spend as they are embedded in the marketing mix. They expect this growth to help firms become adaptive, kill off daily deals, re-emphasize marketing’s “p’s,” and turn consumer electronics into audience-targeting tools (the 4 “P’s” referenced are Product, Packaging, Placement and Price, just as an FYI).
Of course, this sort of research isn’t new. Ever since 2002-ish (after online marketing began recovering from the bubble burst), there’s been research upon research that showed an ever increasing online marketing share. Will it live up to this $77 billion forecast? Only time will tell. I’d say of all these listed (search, display, mobile, email and social), mobile and social will have the greatest impact on advertisers’ digital spend.
This assumption isn’t hard to back up when you look at research conducted by ABI, which predicts that mobile subscriptions will reach 6 billion by the end of 2011 and when you consider that the Earth’s population just surpassed 7 billion, that’s massive. While not all of these connections will have high-speed access, it shows a trend that will only continue to grow.
Layer this into a survey conducted by Razorfish and Yahoo that showed 80% of respondents use their cell phones regularly while watching TV (70% of those multitasking at least once a week and a staggering 49% doing it every day). 38% of these respondents stated that their mobile browsing habits were related to what they were watching on TV, which leaves a huge gap in reaching these distracted viewers. It really underscores the importance to buying an audience, not a medium. A client’s plan should never focus exclusively on one medium, but should try and reach their consumers wherever they are.
And last, but certainly not least, mobile drove 14.3% of Black Friday online traffic and 9.8% of sales. This more than doubles the online traffic from last year and triples the mobile sales from last year. With the surge of smart phones and tablets, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy in place, you need a swift kick in the rear. The future isn’t coming, it’s here.
