October 2015
Featured in this insight: Financial services, IT & telecommunications
Marketing budgets are increasing, survey finds: A report into marketing spend has revealed that marketing budgets are expected to increase for the tenth quarter in a row, on the back of concerns about the global economy as marketing professionals demand greater accountability.
Of the companies in the survey, 4.4 per cent said that their advertising spend increased in the third quarter of 2015, a significantly lower figure than the previous quarter (12.2 per cent).
The findings reflect a time of turbulence within business’ finance, with many companies not quite reaching top line growth and instead scaling back costs to hit the bottom line. As a result, business’ confidence in increasing financial prospects for the future ultimately fell to the lowest it’d been in nine quarters (6.9 per cent), in comparison with the previous quarter’s 13 per cent.
When looking at the confidence of marketing professionals (in terms of financial outlooks improving), the survey revealed that their confidence is declining too, with a total percentage of 22.4 per cent, as opposed to 25.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2015 – a 2.5 year low.
According to the report, internet marketing was found to be the top-performing sector. Other sectors which saw an increase in marketing budgets were: search, events and main media.
During the period the research assessed, PR and market research saw the biggest drops in growth, closely followed by sales promotion, direct marketing and those which fell into the ‘other’ category.
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