Digital Marketing Evolving; Direct Mail Remains Strong

Digital/Online

July 19, 2010 -- The Direct Marketing Association's Digital Marketing Practices and Trends report, which examines today's digital and traditional marketing methods and how they are likely to evolve over the next year, shows that the use of digital media is growing rapidly, yet direct mail remains a strong contender.

Key Findings:

• Most marketers (71%) cite brand building as a main objective of their digital marketing
   

• Online marketing (including search engine optimization and search engine marketing) is predicted to grow to 13% (from 12%) while print advertising will decline to 8% from 9%
   

• Direct mail still represents 17% of the overall marketing budget, which is larger than the share held by any other media -- yet e-mail may slightly surpass direct mail in the next 12 months.  Catalog is expected to decline from 10% to 9%.For B2B marketers, direct mail currently handles the most targeted messages (29%), followed by e-mail (22%)
   

• B2C marketers also use direct mail the most (32%), followed by e-mail (24%). In the next 12 months B2C marketers do not expect to change significantly what they are doing in terms of the media used to target messages. The one exception is that catalog usage will drop and mobile ads will increase
   

• The most used media platform at this time is social media. Some 88% of B2B companies and 82% of B2C companies use social media. The most widely used social media for B2B companies are professional social networks (69%), microblogs (53%), and blogs (47%).  For B2C companies, the most widely used social media were general social networks, such as Facebook (62%), microblogs (54%), and blogs (40%).
   

Discussing findings from this report, George Orme from David Shepard Associates, who wrote the report on behalf of the DMA states, “First, most marketers today are using digital media to both sell and nurture a stronger bond with their customers.  But the study also underscored that very few companies have mastered the analytics and found ways to accurately measure the incremental effect of each media within a multi-media campaign.”
 

Sources:  DMA press release, DMA Releases Digital Marketing Practices and Trends Report, July 19, 2010 and TMCnet. DMA Reports: E-Mail to Surpass Direct Mail, Social Media Popular, Slight Growth in Telemarketing. July 20, 2010.