How Do Digital Marketing Expert Spend Their Budget?

Have you ever wonder how expert digital marketers spend their time and budget? Looking for ways to improve your own digital marketing strength this 2019?

Search Engine Journal shared with us several ways by which marketing expert spend their time and budget on digital marketing and how you could follow in their footsteps in 2019.

SEJ last October went on a research, interviewing 230 digital marketing experts on how they work, what they spend and how they measure their success.  Here is a summary of the result collated from the research.

On SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Three questions were thrown at our experts, if they performed SEO  Audit on a new client website, How often they perform SEO Audit on a client website and how much they spend on SEO.

According to result, 43% of the experts said they usually perform an SEO audit on for a new client website before doing anything, 24%t consider it unnecessary while 33% claims it depends perhaps on the client they are handling.

On how often they perform this audit, 47% claimed they do it every 6 months which is the highest frequency rate. 29% claimed they do it monthly and 15% claimed they do it yearly while 5% probably doesn't do it at all.

So how much do they spend on SEO? according to Search Engine Journal, 31% of respondents spend an average of $51 – $300 on SEO tools per month, with 23% spending less than $50 a month and the shocker is 7% spend above $1000.

 Social Media Marketing is Effective

80% of the respondents say that social media network is still an effective use of resources.
Facebook continues to be the favourite social media platforms for digital marketers with 62% saying they would pick Facebook over any other social media platform out there,

On how they measure their social media effectiveness  39% look at engagements (likes, votes, and comments), 31% prefer conversion and 13% prefer the traffic flow.

On How much they spend on social media paid ads, 46% of respondents are  of the opinion that businesses can be effective on social media without utilising paid campaigns 27% of respondents spend an average of $51 – $300 on social campaigns per month, while 19 % spend $0 – $50 and 16% spend $301 – $1,000

PPC is Vital

Has much as many digital marketers prefer free stuff, Paid advertising still plays a vital role in Digital marketing campaigns.

SEJ research reveals that 42% of digital marketers allocate most of their digital campaign budget to Pay Per Click (PPC) and display ads.

So how much do digital marketers spend on their PPC campaigns?  18% of digital marketers spend between $51 to $300 on average for their monthly PPC campaigns. 17% spend below $50 per month for PPC campaigns and 16% spend $5000 for PPC campaigns per month which is very huge...

The survey also shows that being in the top three positions on SERPs results in the highest number of clicks for ads. It brings in an average CTR of 2-3%.

And Content Marketing remains King

Though digital marketing experts, to be precise, 56% of them believes that a balanced diet of content marketing, SEO, Social media marketing, and link building is the most effective aspect of digital marketing, 53% of the mix claim that they still have a planned content marketing strategy and believes that content marketing still leads the digital marketing strategy.

The irony, however, is that despite content marketing is very vital to digital marketers, not much is allocated to it during budget planning. 24% of respondents spend under $50 a month, while 2% spends between $51 – $300 and 17% spend $301 – $1,000.

So what type of content is most effective?

According to the research, Blog posts tops the category with 41%, long-form content follows behind with  14%, videos 12%, webinars 7% and podcast, 3%

Summary

What does the research tell us?

1. SEO audit is very vital and should be done at least twice a year.
2.  That social media is still effective for business with Facebook as a key player
3.  Paid advertising is still very important even though you can run your campaign without it.
4. That content marketing is king and owning a blog is very important.

Conclusion

From the above research, Digital marketing experts gave us insights into how they effectively run their marketing campaigns, with many of them spending lesser money and still getting the result. This shows that the amount of money budgeted for a digital marketing campaign doesn't really matter but rather the strategies and their effectiveness.