Barometer reveals B2B marketing budget trends

The B2B Barometer survey commissioned by ABBA and the IDM has revealed current and future B2B marketing budget trends.

The study, carried out by Circle Research, found that social media is likely to be the largest future growth area with a 65 per cent increase.

E-mail, web and online advertising were not far behind, with increases of 53 per cent, 49 per cent and 48 per cent respectively.

Outsourcing marketing services is also predicted to increase by five per cent.

The B2B Barometer survey was sent out to more than 2,000 members of the Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM) who qualified as being business-to-business (B2B) organisations with control over their B2B budget and on the client side rather than agency.

Key details from the survey showed a significant lack of knowledge in new activity areas such as social media marketing, which featured highly in future marketing plans.

71 per cent of the respondents agreed that there had recently been a change in emphasis from strategic marketing to lead-generation based marketing.

71 per cent of the surveyed group were in agreement that B2B marketing had matured as a discipline.

Further results revealed that, despite current feelings among many marketers, digital media has still got a long way to go to totally replace conventional print.

In fact, 80 per cent of respondents held this opinion and were happy to admit that they still relied on trade media for some information ahead of websites.

Many hard-copy publishers will doubtless be happy to learn that 80 per cent of the surveyed group disagreed that digital media will make print advertising obsolete.

The survey also revealed forecast future spending trends and the digital sector received a huge boost, but the traditional marketing activities of direct mail, trade shows and print were significantly in the minus, with direct mail recording a drop of 10 per cent, PR a drop of 11 per cent, trade shows down by 13 per cent and print advertising thought likely to be on a downward trend in 2010, reducing by 22 per cent.

13 per cent of B2B marketers were of the opinion that the current downturn will last for another 9-12 months, while 34 per cent forecast 12-18 months and 29 per cent opted for 18-24 months.

50 per cent of those surveyed revealed that they were confident in their organisation's future outlook, though 82 per cent indicated that budgets would remain static or even fall over the next 12 months.

33 per cent of those surveyed reported that their focus in the future will be to acquire new customers.

10 per cent said retention was the plan, while 57 per cent indicated an equal focus on acquisition and retention.

The biggest priorities for the future were identified by the survey as: increasing online presence; building lead generation; communicating value for money; making sure databases are more accurate; and remaining profitable.

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