Digital marketing on the rise by 20% in the marketing mix

What is the vision of Dutch top marketeers on the future of marketing and innovation? In which fields do they intend to concentrate their people and budget the coming three years? Will their role change and how? The first edition of the IAB Digital Marketing Innovation Research, by Deloitte Digital, answers these questions.

Results show that Dutch marketing managers expect digital marketing to be growing even more in the coming three years. At the end of 2016 media expenditure was 54% online and 46% traditional media. This is expected to change to 66% online and 34% traditional media by 2020. To fully use all new data which will become available because of this change in mix, companies expect to have to invest in technology to further automate marketing. Data Management Platforms will become the norm (36% of respondents have a DMP in place, 55% is in the process of getting one). The majority of companies have their data strategy in place. In general (74%) they expect to be able to use 1-2-1 marketing within the next three years.

Everything in-house
Whilst traditionally media and marketing activities were contracted out, this seems to be changing. Nearly 20% of respondents say that they buy their own media and 55% of them do their own marketing activities. It is to be expected that this will grow to 63% in the next three years. Lack of transparency from contractors (75%), but also the wish for more control is the main reason.

Further integration of channels
The respondents expect that there will be full integration of all marketing channels within the next three years. Radio and TV become audiovisual and cross channel optimisation (48%) is to be expected. Mobile will continue to have a prominent place in the mix (58%) and there are experiments with VR and AR. For now these are not yet proven efficient and there is no investment yet.

Biggest challenge: data
Respondents said that they see challenges with the processing of data. Technical aspects and data quality (35%) are mentioned, but also privacy (35%) and updating (25%). Collecting data from the different sources (45%) and using these data to gain insights and to develop concrete actions (25%) were mentioned as well. The gathering of insights is especially difficult because of the lack of the right people.

All results and conclusions about the future of digital marketing can be found in the IAB Digital Marketing Innovation research which can be downloaded here.