To get the most out of your marketing spend you can’t just look at what’s worked in the past; you have to anticipate future trends. Where will marketing teams invest in 2017? What new technologies will compete for your budget?
To help you build a frame of reference for planning next year’s budget, I’ve outlined key trends and areas you should consider spending more on in 2017.
Download the Ultimate Marketing Budget Template and start planning your 2017 spending now!
Five marketing spending trends for 2017
- Software and tools. As your team and company grows, so does their need for more robust tools to support your marketing strategy.
Automation of emails, sales programs, product purchases, and analytics tracking can save you hours of work and help your team to become much more effective at delivering value. Check out our full list of marketing tools for new ideas.
- Search marketing. Forrester predicts that search marketing will capture the greatest share of online spend in 2017. Creating an effective search marketing strategy could mean investing in training, hiring a consultant, or creating an in-house search marketer position.
- Advertising and paid promotion. For the first time, digital advertising spend will outpace TV advertising spend in 2017, according to eMarketer. And digital ads will only continue to grow.
Online advertising and content promotion are becoming more key to marketing success as digital integration continues to rise. - Social media. Social media, in particular, is increasingly becoming a pay-to-play landscape, which marketers continue to undervalue.
According to the DMA, “70 percent of companies are still not collecting data from social media channels,” but this gap is expected to close as, “Social media will grow to 24 percent of marketing budgets within five years, up from 10 percent today.”
- Video content. As you are mapping out your content activities, remember that video content is becoming increasingly effective at reaching consumers.
According to an Animoto survey, “four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.” And the DMA report found, “69 percent of marketers saying their budget on video content is ‘increasing’ or ‘significantly increasing.’”
Have you planned your marketing budget yet? If not, don’t panic! We have a fully built-out marketing budget template you can use to plan your marketing spend for the whole year.
Having a marketing budget in place allows you to be strategic about your spending throughout the year, and to more easily connect the ROI of your efforts to company revenue.
In this template, you’ll be able to:
- Plan out spending on program-specific activities;
- Track monthly, quarterly, and annual spend with built in formulas;
- Keep your budget balanced with auto-populating balance fields for activities, programs, and the overall marketing department spend;
- And more!