A recent Forrester Research report suggests that money spent for interactive marketing will grow to 21 percent of all marketing dollars spent in the United States in 2014.
Predictions about the growth of spending in interactive marketing and advertising seem commonplace to me because I watch for those sorts of things. But what’s striking about Forrester’s commentary about the report (I’ve not seen the full report. It’s expensive.), is that overall spending on advertising will not increase much, if at all, in the next six years. Why? Because marketers will be able to accomplish their current (emphasis mine) marketing goals with less expensive and more efficient interactive marketing.
The implication, of course, is that traditional media like TV, radio, newspapers and direct mail will get smaller and small pieces of the marketing-budget pie. Interactive marketing is just 12 percent of the overall marketing spend now, Forrester says.
The Forrester report indicates that all areas of interactive marketing — search marketing, display advertising, mobile, e-mail and social media — will grow significantly. Money spent to market in social media is predicted to grow from $716 million this year to $3 billion in 2014.
You might be inclined to doubt the accuracy of research predictions that look six years into the future. However, research like this continues to point to an ongoing drain of revenue from traditional media — a drain that will continue even after the current recession has ended. An improved economy won’t alter the course of these winds of change, which have been blowing for at least a decade through the media industry.
The companies who own traditional media must look for new opportunities in all of this and find ways to take advantage of client relationships they’ve built up over many years. They must turn themselves into marketing companies and help their advertisers find new, more efficient and less expensive ways to market their businesses.
If they don’t, they risk becoming less and less relevant in the face of marketers — who for the cost of one full-page ad or less — can set up search engine marketing, e-mail campaigns and Twitter blasts with tangible, trackable results.