Securing Interactive Budgets

Although most contemporary marketing professionals understand that interactive marketing represents the future of marketing, the current economic recession has made it somewhat difficult in getting this message through to the executives that write the checks. Thankfully, the evidence in favor of evolving your firm’s marketing agenda into the modern era continues to pour in every day. It is increasingly easy to find the cold, hard data that your clients or supervisors want to see before they reconsider their bottom line. Here are a few tips on how to break down the current state of marketing to an outsider so that you can secure a solid budget for your next big interactive marketing projects by explaining the current situation.

Just within the last year there have been some convincing studies that forms of traditional advertising are losing their original impact even faster than predicted. The numbers look particularly bleak for forms of printed media such as direct mail or advertisements. Everyone knows that classic avenues of media advertising like newspapers and magazines are dying a slow, painful death. You just need to get it through your manager’s head that interactive marketing is filling the void left behind.Sharing some of these numbers might help you break through. In a recent study by Forrester Research Inc., over half of the marketing professionals who participated in the survey said that they were already in the process of increasing their interactive marketing budgets by moving over funds that were formally used for traditional advertising. The old school methods that were placed on the chopping block first were direct mail (40% reduction in budget) and newspaper advertisements (35% reduction in budget). The numbers associated with interactive marketing, on the other hand, tell a startlingly different story. For example, industry expenditure in mobile marketing is already predicted to surpass $300 million in 2009 and is likely to double in size every year through 2014. This is the first year that most businesses have begun to embrace the power of social media, and an estimated $700 million has already been spent getting relevant marketing programs off the ground. If these numbers are indicative of what is to come during the next decade, businesses who have yet to embrace interactive marketing are already at risk of falling behind.

Despite the media hype on newer forms of interactive marketing, many companies have been understandably slow to embrace the most exciting forms of new media due to shrinking or frozen marketing budgets in the stagnant global economy. However, as leading market indicators seem to be increasingly point to a healthy recovery that is slowly getting underway, it is important for corporate strategists to understand that the time to get ahead of the ball on interactive marketing is now.