Steve Levy, chief operating officer of Ipsos Reid, delivered the tenth edition of the Digital Marketing Pulse today at the Digital Religion conference, an event organized by Marketing and the Canadian Marketing Association.
The Digital Marketing Pulse is an annual public survey of hundreds of Canadian marketers that asks them to gauge their use of, and familiarity with, digital marketing techniques. We asked Levy to share 10 interesting insights from the past decade of survey results, the first five of which are in this earlier post. Today, we present the remaining five insights from this historical data.
You can follow along with live updates on this year’s Digital Pulse by following Marketing on Twitter and by using the hashtag #DR15.
We may have already passed the “Year of Mobile”
In 2008, a third of respondents to the Digital Marketing Pulse survey agreed with the idea that mobile would be the next frontier in digital marketing. In 2014, this number had risen to 50%. It begs the question of whether or not we’ve reached a tipping point, in which the majority of Canadian marketers believe in mobile as the next digital marketing frontier, giving rise to what Levy called, the Year of Mobile. This is underlined by a 2014 result, in which 52% of marketers said they are optimizing their campaigns for mobile devices and tablets, up from 29% in 2011. We’re easily primed, then, to have the majority of marketers optimizing their campaigns for mobile in 2015.
However, in the past “we’ve always looked at mobile as a sort of silo, in effect. We’ve looked at it through the lens of mobile campaigns as opposed to the broader context, being that mobile is part of search, part of social, it’s part of online video… We’ve tended to look at it through a much narrower lens,” said Levy. If we were to look at mobile in a more holistic manner, he added, and think of it as something that occurs across each of these different areas, maybe the Year of Mobile has come and gone without us realizing it happened. “I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but it’s a question that we might pose,” he said.
Everyone’s going social
Back in 2008, 24% of marketers agreed successful companies a social media site, such as Facebook or Twitter as a direct marketing tool. In 2014, that number had risen to 70%. “It’s pretty clear that social is here to stay and that it’s part of the marketing narrative now,” said Levy. It’s not a fad, as some marketers may have guessed in years past.
There’s a change in the air – barriers to digital are shifting
According to changing trends in the survey’s results, marketers are more familiar with digital marketing, understand it better and are better educated than in the past. “They’re still looking for better results, but that lack of knowledge we’ve seen in the past, and the need for proof, are probably less hurdles to allocating more of the marketing budget to digital than we’ve seen in the past,” said Levy.
While the need to demonstrate ROI isn’t as pronounced for digital marketing as it was in the past, the need to show results hasn’t gone away. One indicator has been the survey’s changing response to whether more internal resources are needed for digital marketing. In 2010, only 2% of marketers thought there was a need for more internal resources to execute on digital marketing campaigns. “They didn’t understand what they needed and where things were going,” said Levy. By 2011 and 2012, that number had moved up to 15%. “That doesn’t mean they got the resources,” Levy pointed out, “it means they recognized they needed them.”
Marketers and agencies are carving out their domains, but they’re still working together
Between 2011 and 2013, the Digital Marketing Pulse indicated a downward trend in the number of marketers stating their reliance on agencies would increase. Interestingly though, in 2014 that trend reversed and almost half the marketers surveyed said their reliance on agencies had actually increased.
According to Levy, there’s a possibility that “marketing is becoming so much more complicated you can’t hire all the expertise you need. You have to sub-contract it out.” It’s important to note though, said Levy, that several digital marketing practices are still taken care of by marketers themselves, particularly email marketing, social networking and blogging.
Best practices for digital marketing mirror those in traditional marketing
“At the end of the day, it’s essential for the success of any campaign to know who your target is, know what to say, establish some metrics to measure success and execute them in a ethical fashion. And that’s no different whether you’re in the digital or the traditional world,” said Levy.
