B2B Advertising: Interactive Up, Think Twice Before Giving Up On Print

B2B

March 17, 2010 -- According to Outsell’s Annual Advertising and Marketing Study 2010, U.S. B2B advertising and marketing spending will increase by just 0.8% this year to $129 billion, yet interactive spending is expected to climb 9.2%, to $51.5 billion.
 

B2B marketers will increase spending on some interactive tactics significantly more than average. Marketing spending on social networking sites is predicted to rise 43.3%, webinar spending to increase 26%, search engine spending up 17.1%, and company website spending is expected to rise 7.5%.
 

Asked to rate the effectiveness of specific social media sites in their marketing efforts, more than half of respondents (51%) said that Facebook was “extremely” or “somewhat” effective. Somewhat fewer (45%) said the same of LinkedIn, and just 35% considered Twitter effective.
 

The Outsell study indicates that B2B marketers are believers in the effectiveness of integrated media. While 38.6% of B2B marketers said a single media format by itself was “extremely or somewhat effective,” close to three out of four surveyed (72.5%) said multiple formats together were “extremely or somewhat effective.”
 

The Outsell report advises B2B publishers to think twice before giving up on print or in-person events. “Decisions to abandon the traditional media of print and events build in a loss of effectiveness and ROI for advertisers that will lead them to pay less for the one media offering than the cross-media offering,” the report states.

Sources:  eMarketer, B2B Marketers Up Social Spend, March 17, 2010 and BtoB Media Business, Reports Offer Good News, Bad News for B-to-B Media, March 9, 2010.