According to a new Forrester report, Europeans will double their spending on online marketing over the next five years from about $10.3 billion in 2006 to over $22.1 billion in 2012.
Over 25,000 consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK were polled while interviews were conducted on twenty-four major European marketers. According to the results, online marketing will account for about 18% of total media budgets in just five short years. This includes email, search and display advertising.
According to the report “Firms will raise their online budgets primarily to better reach the growing audience that relies on the Web for a widening range of decisions. After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realize that the Web is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion.”
This shift in spending should come as no surprise; the world audience and its attention has been moving online for some time now. In fact, 36% of online Europeans say that they watch less television because they’re going online instead. 28% reported reading less of the newspapers for the same reason.
Consumers also cited lack of trust in advertisers as a reason for their shift towards online spending. A whopping 67% said they didn’t believe that most advertisers were truthful in their attempts to market their products.
But 40% of online consumers said they trust sites utilizing price comparisons and 36% said they trust online product reviews originating from other users.
Forrester also interviewed twenty-four major European marketers in an attempt to gain some insight into their current online marketing strategies and their plans for the future. They found that “All of the interviewees use banner ads, with seventeen using buttons and the same percentage using online sponsorships. More than half of them also use rich media ads. Interviewees cite a variety of drivers for online spend, with ten wanting to grow their business and nine saying that they are simply following their consumers.”
Most respondents said that they use paid search and seventeen said that they pay agency fees. None of the respondents indicated that they’d be spending less on search in the next five years and about 75% of them expect to be spending more. This is because they’ve come to realize that this type of spending yields good return on investment (ROI) and that they need to keep up with the general trend if they wish not to be left behind. Additionally, this illustrates a widespread desire to do more targeted marketing, and where better to achieve this than over the ever-expanding Internet?
