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2008 B2B Marketing Forecast: Rise in Budgets, Online Spending (Updated)

Most B2B marketers (some 60 percent) plan to increase their 2008 marketing budgets - but fully 79 percent plan to increase their online marketing budgets, according to BtoB magazine’s “2008 Marketing Priorities and Plans” study, writes MarketingCharts.

BtoB’s previous survey (2006) had found that nearly 76 percent of marketers planned to increase their online budgets in 2007.

Nearly 30 percent of marketers said their budgets would remain unchanged in 2008, and 10 percent said they plan to decrease budgets, according to the survey of 213 B2B marketers conducted online in the last week of November and the first week of December.

Among the key findings of the survey:

• Some 62 percent of B2B marketers said their primary goal in 2008 would be customer acquisition, 19 percent cited brand awareness and nearly 12 percent pointed to customer retention.
• Online will constitute more than one-third (nearly 34 percent) of marketing budgets in 2008, B2B marketers said; that’s up from the nearly 27 percent cited for 2007.
• Online areas that marketers plan to increase next year are website development (74 percent of marketers said so); email (70 percent); search engine marketing (64 percent); video (40 percent); webcasting (39 percent); banners (36 percent); sponsorships (30 percent); and social media (26 percent).
• Rating ad agency partners’ willingness and ability to adapt programs according to marketing goals, 54 percent of B2B marketers said “OK” and 41 percent said “excellent.”
• Rating trade-media partners’ willingness and ability to tailor programs to fit marketing goals, nearly 66 percent said “OK” and 28 percent said “excellent.”
• Nearly 20 percent of B2B marketers say they are using social media as part of the marketing mix: Among them, 40 percent use them for customer feedback, 31 percent for market research, 29 percent for advertising, 27 percent as a sales channel.

MarketingCharts provides other findings from BtoB’s survey of B2B marketers.