‘Integrated Marketing Media Mix’ Study: More Digital with Mainstay Traditional

As marketers integrate their media campaigns, they are adding email and other digital media in ever-increasing numbers - though offline media remain vital to integrated campaigns, according to “the Integrated Marketing Media Mix” a report from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), MarketingCharts reports.

Among marketing campaigns, 79.1 percent used email - the leading medium - but 75.4 percent used direct mail, marketers reported.

Overall some 82 percent of surveyed companies said they use integrated marketing; that proportion varied somewhat depending on company size, with small companies the least likely to say so - see chart of integrated marketing use by business size.

Asked how their media use has evolved over the past three years, marketers said they are using more digital media: 75.8 percent said they are using more email than they were three years ago, 61.1 percent are using more online video, and 62.9 percent are using more search engine marketing.

Asked to project how they will use media in the future, marketers essentially said they would continue doing more of the same - i.e., increase use of digital media. (View chart of expected change in media use, by medium, over the next three years.)

• 81 percent of respondents said they expect an increase in email use, and the mean expected change in media use was 4.21 on a 1-5 scale (with 4=increase by 0 percent to 10 percent - see chart for details).
• Other digital media forecast to see higher use include (in order) search engine marketing, new media, campaign URL/PURLs, online video, banner/popup ads, and mobile.

Some other key findings from DMA’s “The Integrated Marketing Media Mix”:

• Five of the top six shares of the direct marketing media budget went to offline media: direct mail, catalog, direct response TV/radio, events, and telephone; only email, which came in second with 11.3 percent of the budget, broke into the top five media allocations. (View chart.)
• Direct mail remains an important player in terms of revenue. Respondents attributed 29 percent of the revenue generated from a campaign to direct mail, followed by email with 21.6 percent of revenue.
• Digital media scored very high in terms of efficiency. When measuring relative return on investment (relative ROI), email produced roughly twice (1.93x) the revenue share relative to its share of the budget.
• B2B integrated campaigns use telephone (42.7 percent vs. 29.3 percent) and events (34.9 percent vs. 18 percent) more often than do B2C campaigns, which in turn use DR Newspaper/Magazine ads (29.4 percent vs. 18.2 percent) and DR TV/Radio (29.4 percent vs. 4.2 percent) ads more frequently than B-2B campaigns.
• B2C marketers gather 8.2 percent of their responses from the direct marketing campaign via retail stores, compared with 1.1 percent of B2B marketers, who have better luck with email (17.2 percent of responses vs. 9.2 percent).
• Small companies (fewer than 100 employees) led larger companies (101 or more employees) in using several new media, particularly RSS feeds at 17.9 vs. 11.4 percent, blogs at 32.1 percent vs. 24.6 percent, and social networking sites as 28.4 percent vs. 23.2 percent.

“Even as marketers are bringing more digital media into their integrated campaigns, traditional media remain a core component of the marketing mix” said Yoram Wurmser, Ph.D., DMA research manager and author of the report.

“Digital media ranging from the firmly established email to the nascent mobile marketing channels are complementing - not replacing - direct mail, telephone, events, and direct response broadcast advertisements,” Wurmser said.

About the study: DMA’s “The Integrated Marketing Media Mix” report provides benchmarks on the media strategies marketers are using in their integrated campaigns; identifies best-practices; and ascertains how organizations are approaching integrated-marketing challenges. The report also breaks many of the responses down by one of five segmentations: expertise level, type of market (business-to-business vs. business-to-consumer), type of offering (products, services, donations), size of average sale, and size of company.