4% growth in Australian marketing budgets

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Throughout 2010, Australian marketing budgets have increased by 7%. Compare this to next year’s planned marketing budgets and the 4% increase suggests that growth has slowed. However, despite the fact that the average planned rise is lower in 2011, a survey has found that 44% of marketing companies expected a rise of 15% in their marketing budgets.

Key priorities for marketing companies remain unchanged when compared to the last survey carried out. The most important priorities include:

Focusing more on maximising the efficiency of how marketing budgets are spent.

Focusing more on improving and finding new measures to increase sales.

Maintaining brand reputation.

The channels that received the biggest growth in investment in the last year are social networks and applications. Both saw a 10% increase from 2009. Online advertising was next, then viral marketing and direct marketing.

Chief Executive of the Australian Marketing Institute, Mark Crowe said that, ‘Overall, a further increase in budgets is expected, which represents a consolidation of the strong growth that was experienced last year.’

‘Online and new media not surprisingly continue to enjoy high levels of increased usage. However, traditional media can also look forward to increased usage albeit not at the same level.’

The findings were gathered from The Second Annual Senior Marketers Monitor, which is based on 369 responses from senior marketers.

Yahoo Email Service Updates

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In line with Gmail’s new ‘Priority Inbox’ and Hotmail’s recent makeover, email service provider Yahoo has recently updated its own email system with the codename ‘Minty.’

In an attempt to attract current and new users, Yahoo has updated its portal to include social, SMS, photos and videos.  Yahoo email users will now be able to check and post to their Facebook and Twitter profiles so that they don’t even need to leave their inbox to visit different websites. As well as this, Yahoo users are able to use Flickr and Youtube within their email to view videos and photos.

Yahoo is also set to try other communication avenues by including instant messaging and SMS in its services.

The updated portal will have a system which remembers user favourites and will organise email based on what it thinks is most relevant or desirable to each individual. Using cloud based services, Yahoo has claimed the new service is twice as fast with an improved spam filter. 

To minimize the impact this will have on email marketing, marketing lists will need to be segmented based on categories like brand, message type and activity.  

It will be important to try to win back inactive consumers and also remove dead email addresses. A win-back strategy is something that too many marketing companies fail to do but it will help to ensure that emails are not wasted. 

Now that more methods of engagement are possible within email campaigns, it might be an idea to take advantage of this and try using a Youtube video in emails in order to boost response rates. 

Finally, an email marketing strategy that fulfils multichannel requirements will be crucial to user responsiveness and engagement. Providing the option of social media channels within messages by including a “Share this” button in your email campaigns can spread brand awareness and engagement. A study by ‘GetResponse’ showed that there was an increase of 30% click-throughs when these buttons were added.

Yahoo’s changes will create obstacles for email marketing specialists but these can be converted to opportunity for marketing companies who are able to adapt and provide more relevant and consistently engaging content.

105.5M Online Spend Increase in Australia

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Australia’s IAB recently reported that online advertising saw a $105.5 million spending increase in the third quarter of 2010, in comparison to the same time in 2009. 

CEO of IAB Australia, Paul Fisher said:

Feedback from media agencies and advertisers indicates a continued and growing confidence in the online channel as an effective medium to reach, engage and influence consumers, and these expenditure figures demonstrate that investment is indeed following consumer behaviour – online.

Overall, online advertising spending growth was positive with general display seeing an increase of 26%, classifieds of 30% and search and directories by 18%.

Fisher also stated that media feedback indicated that this growth is set to continue as confidence in online and digital channels to reach and influence consumers is on the incline. The spending figures are following consumer behaviour online as well as keeping up with demand.

Thanks to the latest increase in expenditure, the online advertising industry is set to spend over $2.2 billion in 2010, putting them in a better position than ever in the total Australian advertising market. 

Display advertising and classified advertising was said to account for 26.5% and 24.6% of the total advertising spending whilst other mediums made up the other 48.9%.

In general display advertising, email based made up $7.6 million of the advertising spending, which is an increase of 6% compared to the same time last year. 

Dominant industries in the display advertising market include finance, vehicles, computers and communications as they made up 44.3% of the general display expenditure. 

Motor vehicle manufacturers were the largest subcategory, although it was very marginally down in the second quarter of 2010 compared to the same time last year. 

Real estate was found to be the largest category for classified ad spending, followed by recruitment and automotive.

The report by the IAB was said to have collected its advertising data from more than 1000 websites; it was managed by Pricewaterhouse Coopers.