Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend
Report: SMBs dedicate bulk of digital spending to online marketing services
A report from Borrell Associates found that SMBs spend an average of $17,000 annually on online marketing services or 72% of their total online budgets, compared with 16% to online promotions and 12% to online advertising.
According to Borrell, the categories of spending within marketing services are maintaining a Web presence (52% of all spending or $202 billion this year), online public relations (12%), online marketing support (11.3%), online ad production (12.9%) and online consulting and research (12.1%).
Businesses with fewer than 50 employees will spend less than $500 a year—just enough for Web hosting and email list management. Mid-sized companies with more than 50 employees will spend $63,000 a year, covering other areas like SEO, video production, public relations and social media. Companies with over 5,000 employees account for the bulk of spending ($226.5 billion) in the $390 billion market for online marketing services.
What is really interesting to us at Affinity Express is who benefits from these investments by SMBs. Borrell lays out four major groups:
- Media companies: Tend to sell only "advertising" products and include dozens of players, including Yellowpages.com, Supermedia, DexOne, Hearst and Gannett.
- Local ad agencies: Manage a variety of marketing needs and typically buy advertising for local businesses, but are not as strong in digital media.
- Services companies: Offer everything from printing (VistaPrint and Deluxe Corp.) to small business loans (American Express) or payroll and accounting services (Intuit/Quicken) and digital marketing services to customers.
- Digital disruptors: Internet pure-plays like Web.com, Local.com Yodle and Reputation.com, which usually sell services directly to SMBs using telemarketing or locally salespeople.
It is exciting to see these numbers on the rise. Affinity Express is not in one of the categories above, but we serve these groups that support SMBs with our digital and print marketing production services, leveling the playing field for SMBs so they can cost-effectively market their companies online.
