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15 July 2008
Bellwether report: digital still growing
The latest Bellwether report – which looks at the health of the UK marketing industry – revealed a downturn in marketing and ad budgets. But the one area still showing a rise in budget was for online, albeit with smaller growth than was forecast.
Direct marketing has been particularly hard hit; however, we predict that online will remain relatively immune as the results are so clearly quantifiable. For example with Google, if you're spending £1,000 a month for £5,000 return on investment, why would you cut a solid revenue stream?
Direct marketing is great, but campaigns can take a long time to put together and deploy, anything from eight to twelve weeks for example.
Online campaigns offer far more flexibility as the medium is far more agile and campaigns can be adjusted, ramped up, even paused instantly. Moreover, digital campaigns can quickly be tweaked and optimised for a greater, more directly measurable effect.
One way to shore up ROI during a difficult economic period is to put the brakes on brand-building and perhaps rely on brand inertia. For example, if you're a well-known brand like Barclaycard, people aren't going to forget you're Barclaycard during a downturn.
Instead invest money into performance media such as pay per click, affiliate, email, etc. And if you're worried about erosion of your brand recognition you can track this using tools such as Google Trends.
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