June 29, 2020

A look back at the first digital marketing report

June 29, 2020

A look back at the first digital marketing report

A look back at the first digital marketing report

In 2014 Bang Digital launched the WA Digital Marketing Report. The report was a first of its kind, providing WA businesses with real industry insights that were relevant to them in the Perth market. Since then, we have published 7 annual reports. This history provides a roadmap of where digital marketing has come from and where it may go in the future. Below, we will look back on the first WA Digital Marketing Report and compare it to the latest 2020 WA Digital Marketing Report.PrioritiesIn 2014, the top three priorities were identified as SEO, social media and SEM. Compared to 2020, social media is now the number one priority while SEO moved down and email marketing became more important.GrowthThe growth in social media is large, from 76% to 95.6% of respondents. Email marketing grew from 61% to 84.7%. SEM actually decreased from 74% to 59.9%. Interestingly, SEO has remained steady from 76% in 2014 to 78.8% in 2020.TrendsThe predicted trends for 2014 were advertising on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. Moving into 2020, the predicted trends were again the medium on which content and advertising would be delivered, instead this time it was video and podcasting that were set to soar.ChallengesIn 2020, businesses are facing challenges that include:

  • Keeping up with new trends and channels
  • Having enough time and resources to be everywhere
  • Effective content creation
  • Differentiating themselves from competitors
  • Effectively harnessing data for decision making
  • Educating and backing from management for digital

Interestingly, these aren’t too dissimilar from 2014’s challenges which were:

  • Marketing budget
  • Staff qualified to manage digital strategies
  • Digital marketing knowledge
  • Understanding ROI
  • Internal preference for offline marketing
  • (Lack of) corporate support for digital marketing strategies

BudgetsIn 2014, the average digital marketing spend was 58% of the total budget. For small-medium businesses, this made up 42% of their budget, compared to 59% of the budget for large companies.Looking at 2020, we saw a trend of increasing of digital marketing budgets, with significant growth for companies planning to spend $100k+ online growth from 20.6% in 2019 to 25.5% in 2020, while the $1k-$5k spenders declined from 25.2% in 2019 to 24.1% in 2020. See the shift over the last year in the graphic below.

Digital Marketing Spend 2018-2020

This look back has been interesting. It’s really shown that while digital has grown in importance over the last 7 years, some things about it don’t change as frequently, like the challenges and popular platforms. To look back at all the WA Digital Marketing Reports, you can access them here >>