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Research into how often you should post on social 

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Research into how often you should post on social 

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Here’s what research from Buffer has revealed about the optimal posting frequency for each social media channel:

Facebook – 2 times per day
Twitter – 3 times per day
LinkedIn – 1 time per day
Google+ – 3 times per day
Pinterest – 5x per day
Instagram – 1.5 times per day

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Gmail is email that's intuitive, efficient, and useful. 15 GB of storage, less spam, and mobile access.

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Key Findings from U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey, 2013

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Key Findings from U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey, 2013

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Marketing leaders have secured bigger budgets to define markets and attract, acquire and retain customers. Yet, increased funding is a double-edged sword. It brings new opportunities but puts more pressure on marketers to deliver and prove a return on the investments. Use our seven key findings to benchmark your marketing budgets and review our recommendations to enhance your digital marketing efforts. (See Note 1 for the definition of digital marketing.)

Finding No. 1: 10.4% of 2012 Revenue Was Spent on Marketing, and Budgets Will Increase 6% in 2013

On average, companies spent 10.4% of their annual 2012 revenue on overall marketing activities. These expenses include salaries, and both traditional and digital marketing costs. The range of spending is wide - 14% of companies spent less than 5% of revenue and 17% of companies spent more than 15% of revenue on marketing. Figure 1 shows budgets will increase an average of 5.7% this year.

Media companies allocated a larger share to marketing expenditures (12.7%) than other vertical industries. Media companies also plan the biggest increase in spending (9.9%) this year.

A total of 43% of respondents said their 2013 operating budgets will increase this year. Forty-seven percent said their budgets will stay about the same. Only 10% are bracing for a budget decrease.

By comparison, IT budgets for 2012 averaged 3.5% of revenue, according to "IT Metrics: IT Spending and Staffing Report, 2013." Gartner's annual CIO survey reports global weighted average IT budgets are essentially flat in 2013, decreasing on average 0.5% (see "Hunting and Harvesting in a Digital World: the 2013 CIO Agenda").

In addition to these marketing expense budgets, two-thirds of marketers have a capital budget that they are using to acquire marketing software licenses and the infrastructure (servers and storage) to run it on.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 2: Digital Marketing Spending Averages 2.5% of Company Revenue

Customers are transitioning to communicating and buying through digital channels. That means marketing spending is rapidly shifting to digital marketing. On average, annual digital marketing operating budgets represented 2.5% of a company's revenue in 2012. These expenses include personnel costs, contract labor, software as a service and external marketing services such as agency creative services, search, website design, content creation and management, social and mobile marketing.

Three percent of the marketers responding to our survey said they are spending more than half of their marketing budgets on digital activities. The majority spends between 10% and 50% of their marketing budget on digital marketing activities - the average is 25%.

It is becoming more difficult to count and allocate digital marketing spending as digital and traditional marketing techniques are merging. For 20% of companies, digital marketing activities have already been incorporated into each function within marketing, and budgets are no longer broken out separately. We expect this trend to continue growth as areas such as second screen TV, social TV and QR codes integrate with traditional channels.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 3: Digital Advertising Accounts for 12.5% of Digital Marketing Budgets

Marketing leaders support a diverse and increasingly complex marketing mix. We asked marketers how much of their digital marketing budget they're allocating to different activities such as mobile marketing or analytics.

Figure 3 shows that marketers allocated 12.5% - the biggest share of their digital marketing budget - to digital advertising. Still, marketers wrestle with digital advertising's effectiveness. Advertising agencies, technology providers and brand advertisers are working to address this concern by improving measurement standards and formats.

Content creation and management account for the second largest share of digital marketing budgets. This is driven, in part, by the desire to populate the infinite appetites of inbound marketing channels. Social networks, customer forums, and the blogosphere are examples that drive inbound inquiries or actions. However, you need to create content that delivers the right message to the right person at the right time, regardless of how the dialogue gets started. That means content is equally needed to meet the demands of outbound marketing as well. The enormous pressure to create, manage and distribute content for multiple marketing activities through the right channels will only increase as customers use more digital channels for collaboration, researching and acquisition of products and services.

Top priorities for increased budgets in 2013 are commerce experiences, social and mobile marketing, and content creation and management. See "Digital Marketers Escalate Investments to Support Commerce Experiences" to learn why enhancing commerce experiences is a business imperative.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 4: 41% of Marketers Say That Savings From Digital Marketing Are Reinvested

We asked marketers to identify how they're funding their digital marketing activities. We found that digital marketing's effectiveness helps stretch digital marketing budgets. Figure 4 shows that two in five marketers are realizing savings from digital marketing compared with traditional techniques. And they're taking that money and reinvesting it into more digital marketing. Fifty-nine percent of the marketers in retail organizations report that this is happening compared with only 28% in manufacturing.

On average, 28% of marketers say they've reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund digital marketing activities. Thirty-four percent of the marketers at high-tech companies are more likely to take this approach compared with only 19% of the marketers at financial services and insurance firms.

Reinvesting savings into digital marketing activities is a smart move. And it's a relatively new activity in a corporate culture where technology has primarily been used in recent years to cut costs. We don't recommend chasing shiny new objects unreservedly. Rather, we suggest supporting a culture that is agile and keeps an open mind to testing new techniques and underlying technologies. It's okay to fail - as long as you fail fast in a program with a limited scope and budget, and you intend to learn from these early failures.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 5: Up to 50% of Digital Marketing Activities Are Outsourced

The pace of change and needs for specific skills force marketing to seek services from external providers. We asked marketers to estimate what percentage of the work is performed internally by employees or contract labor, and what percentage is performed externally or outsourced.

Culturally marketing is accustomed to outsourcing. Working with agencies, data providers and external technology providers are an intricate part of marketing processes. This hasn't changed and may be increasing. The responses reveal that digital marketers need help - lots of it - with specialized tasks such as search marketing, online advertising and mobile marketing. For the most part, marketers outsource one-third or more of their work to an agency, digital services organization or other external provider.

Figure 5 shows that, on average, marketers outsource one-half of their search marketing - the highest proportion of any marketing activity. Media companies, financial services firms and retailers keep a majority of their search marketing work in-house.

Digital marketers are more likely to maintain social marketing in-house, with one exception: Marketers at manufacturers outsource 53% of their social marketing activities. We find that social analytics, and content creation and management are areas of focus for outsourcing. Monitoring and analyzing social activities require time and new technologies. And keeping customers interested through social channels requires constant feeding and nurturing with new content.

As a rule, outsourcing your digital marketing activities is a smart tactic when you don't have in-house resources to stay on top of quickly changing technologies and techniques, or need specialized talent. But you need to monitor results, ensure these providers have a stake in your success, and assume some risks.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 6: 70% of Companies Surveyed Have a Chief Marketing Technologist - 80% of Them Report to Marketing

Marketing's dependence on technology results in new responsibilities - and roles. We asked marketers whether their companies have the equivalent of a chief marketing technologist and where that person reports. Figure 6 shows that two out of three organizations have such a role. Most of the chief marketing technologists report to a senior marketing executive and only 13% report to the CIO.

Chief marketing technologists are familiar with marketing techniques as well as technologies. They need to understand how to use technology to define markets, attract, acquire and retain customers. They often have organizations that align this goal to areas such as marketing software, data and analytics, social and mobile platforms, digital advertising networks collaboration and website design. This role may come under one of many different titles, including CTO of marketing, chief digital officer, chief digital marketing officer, VP of e-business or even the CMO.

What's driving the need for this role? Marketers are increasingly dependent on technology to:

Design the customer experience across many channels - social, mobile, commerce and website.

Integrate data from an increasing number of sources, including internal data (such as transactions or on-site search) and external data (estimated household income) to get a better understanding of customers.

Support marketing campaigns and programs, such as a mobile app, paid search marketing and social marketing.

Hiring marketing technologists will help you achieve your tactics. But you need a senior-level executive who can guide your customer experience strategy across many channels and match marketing technologies to the organizational goals.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Finding No. 7: The Top 3 Digital Marketing Activities Key to Marketing's Success - Corporate Website, Social Marketing and Digital Advertising

Marketers are focused on the marketing mix that will drive success. We asked digital marketers to identify the three digital marketing activities that are most important to their success.

Figure 7 shows that the corporate website and digital advertising share the distinction of being the No. 1 digital marketing activities that are important to marketing's success. Social marketing emerged as the next most important activity.

Our survey results suggest that the corporate website will not be displaced by a brand's social media presence anytime soon. That's all the more reason for marketing leaders to continuously invest in testing and optimizing their websites, paying attention to all aspects - from customized landing pages to compelling content that encourage visitors to be engaged with your brand.

Only 9% of respondents said that analytics is most important to their success. We believe this is an oversight. You need to use analytics to support continuous improvement, understand your customers' requirements and drive results.

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

What to Do Next

Review how companies like yours allocate their marketing budgets. Use Gartner's "Toolkit: Compare Your Digital Marketing Spending Against Those of Your Peers" as a starting point to evaluate whether and how you should shift digital marketing budget allocations.

Ensure that your marketing team and external partners have the marketing chops to adapt to the evolving landscape. Marketing has always been an art and a science, but the growth in underlying technology (marketing analytics, for example) requires marketers to have access to technology talent.

Appoint a chief marketing technologist, or someone with equivalent responsibilities, to align your organizational goals of attracting, acquiring and retaining customers across the many digital channels with current and future technology landscape. We've come across people with titles such as CTO of marketing, chief digital officer, chief digital marketing officer, VP of e-business and CMO who have assumed the duties of chief marketing technologist.

Take any savings from your digital marketing activities, reinvest those funds into more of what's working well, plus pilots for emerging techniques. Measure the effectiveness of experimental activities to determine whether they should stay in your marketing mix.

Take a fresh look at your corporate website and online advertising activities - don't let either run on autopilot. Both require significant investments in content creation and management and technology. Both were cited as the most important digital marketing activity to marketing's success.

Test how and what offerings can be sold via your company's commerce experience and determine how you'll drive buyers there.

Rely on agencies and other marketing service providers when you lack specialized expertise such as mobile app development or running paid search efforts. Ensure these partners have a stake in your success and assume some risks.

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Key Findings from U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey, 2013

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Marketing leaders have secured bigger budgets to define markets and attract, acquire and retain customers. Yet, increased funding is a double-edged sword. It brings new opportunities but puts more pressure on marketers to deliver and prove a return on the investments.

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What Percent of Revenue to Spend on Marketing Budget? | Vital Design

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What Percent of Revenue to Spend on Marketing Budget? | Vital Design

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In the mid 90s, Steve Jobs took a company on the brink of extinction and turned it into the largest and most successful brand in the world. The Apple of the 90s looks a whole lot shinier today, sitting pretty at the top of Forbes most valuable brands list for the seventh year in a row. So, how did Jobs do it? Besides being a visionary and perfectionist, Steve Jobs was a genius marketer. He understood the vital role marketing plays in a company's success, which explains why Apple and many of the most successful companies in the world spend more on marketing and sales than they do on research and development. A strong brand and marketing strategy is a powerful asset and Jobs knew it.

Marketing Matters

Determining the effect of marketing on a company's growth is not black and white. There are many factors that combine to create a successful and growing business. However, without marketing a company gets very little, if any, promotion or exposure, meaning the chances of growth are slim to none. This is a well-known fact among marketers, evident in the amount of dollars successful corporations allocate toward sales and marketing every year. In 2016/17, MindBody, Salesforce, Bottomline Technologies, Tableau, Oracle and Johnson & Johnson all had marketing and sales budgets that were greater than 20% of revenue, some spending close to 50%! All of these companies also grew year-over-year.

So, how does a company determine how much of their budget to spend on marketing? We decided to look at a handful of some of the most successful large and mid-sized companies across a range of industries to find out how much they allocate for marketing and what they get in return.

Is 10% the Magic Number?

Ten percent - this is the magic number you will likely hear whenever you ask how much of your revenue you should spend on marketing. But is that true for everyone? What about a company in its growth phase vs. a well-established brand like Apple? As budgets continue to climb for the third year in a row, many companies - especially those with more than $5 billion in revenue - are abandoning the 10% rule in favor of bigger budgets, with a heavy focus on digital marketing.

According to a 2016-2017 Gartner Research study, companies are now spending roughly 12% of annual revenue on overall marketing. The study concluded that "larger companies (>$5 billion revenue) spend 13% of revenue on marketing, while smaller companies ($250 million to $500 million revenue) spend roughly 10% of annual revenue."

A 2017 CMO survey published by the American Marketing Association and Duke University pegged the numbers a bit lower, reporting that across all industries businesses spend 11.4% of budget on marketing and only 6.9% of revenue on marketing. Of course, these figures vary wildly when you drill down into each industry.

Percent of revenue by industry:

Education: 18.5%

Consumer services: 17.4%

Transportation: 11.2%

Consumer Packaged Goods: 11%

Service Consulting: 9.4%

Tech/Software/Biotech: 8.5%

Communications/Media: 6.6%

Healthcare: 6.2%

Banking/Finance/Insurance: 3.9%

Retail/Wholesale: 3.8%

Energy: 2.2%

Mining/Construction: 2%

Marketing is responsible for leading revenue growth at 38.4 percent of companies, according to the CMO Survey. "These companies have larger marketing budgets as a percentage of the overall company budget (14.5 percent) than companies that do not assign primary responsibility for revenue growth to marketing," reported the Wall Street Journal. "At such companies, the marketing budget represents only 10.8 percent of the total budget. This is a significant difference, and it illustrates marketing's ability to influence corporate strategy and potentially lead to larger marketing budgets."

So, while the 10% number may be right for some businesses, it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all figure.

These studies offer great insight into marketing spend across industries; but they only offer averages. We wanted to know what actual, individual companies were spending, from the small guys to the big kahunas. So, we set out to do what no writer wants to do: math. Luckily most of the 10-Ks we examined did most of the math for us ... nevertheless there were numbers involved. Almost immediately, MailChimp tried to throw us for a loop with their unique, not so SEC friendly take on the annual report. But then we remembered they were owned by Rocket Science Group and we were back on track! Here is what we discovered (broken down by industry).

SaaS Companies

Salesforce and MindBody are in the business of marketing and sales management software. And they believe in what they are selling. Just take a look at their numbers. Salesforce invests 49% of their revenue into sales and marketing! 49%! Think about that for a minute. That's nearly half of the $6.67 billion in revenue generated in 2016. What do they get in return for such a hefty investment? They get growth! In 2016 Salesforce grew by 24% over the previous year. What's more, Salesforce has a 19.7% market share of the CRM industry, which is greater than some of the most well-known CRM providers - Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.

MindBody, a cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry with a 2016 revenue of $139 million, invested 40% of their revenue into sales and marketing, which resulted in 37% growth year-over-year.

Both MindBody and Salesforce far out-spent on marketing and sales compared to research and development (Salesforce spent 14% on R&D; MindBody spent 22% on R&D), a trend that is consistent across most industries, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and technology.

Tableau, a younger and smaller company that went public in 2013, has now become one of the fastest-growing companies in the 57-year history of business analytics software, thanks to demand for visual analytics and a large investment in sales and marketing. According to a Tableau 2014 annual financial report, investment in marketing is expected to increase in 2015 and the company "expects sales and marketing expenses to be our largest category of operating expenses as we continue to expand our business." Fast-forward two years, and Tableau's 2016 year-end financial statement reflects this investment, with their revenue doubling from $412.6 million in 2014 to $826.9 million in 2016.

Here's a quick breakdown:

MindBody - 40% of revenue invested in marketing, 37% revenue growth year-over-year

Salesforce - 49% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 24% revenue growth year-over-year

Tableau - 58% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 27% revenue growth year-over-year

Manhattan Associates - 7.9% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 8.7% revenue growth year-over-year

Bottomline Technologies - 24.5% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 3.7% revenue growth year-over-year

One thing is clear here - 10% isn't the magic number. At least for these software and marketing mavens, who are targeting growth and doing so very successfully thanks to their investment in showcasing the services they sell.

The Techies

In the digital age, it is no surprise that technology companies dominated the Forbes list of top brands in 2016. Microsoft, Google, Apple and Intel are four successful, well-known, multinational companies. As monsters in their industry, they are established, have much higher revenue and are not looking for the same type of exposure as a smaller company might be. While they clearly have the revenue, do these established brands need to keep investing in marketing? The answer is yes, just not as aggressively. As Horace Dediu, founder of independent research firm Asymco and a former Nokia business development manager, said in a Reuters article, "The stronger, more differentiated the product, the less it needs to be propped up by advertising (referring to Apple's ad spend)."

Here are their numbers for 2017 (note: if 2017 numbers were not available at the time of writing we used 2016 data):

Microsoft - 17% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 5% revenue growth year-over-year

Google (FY 2016) - 12.3% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 20.4% revenue growth year-over-year

Apple - 7% of revenue invested in selling, general and administrative, 6% revenue growth year-over-year

Intel (FY 2016) - 14% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 7% revenue growth year-over-year

Oracle - 22% of revenue invested in sales and marketing, 2% growth year-over-year

Marketing in Manufacturing

Similar to the other industries examined, manufacturing companies are making significant investments in marketing and sales.

Here's how it breaks down for the two manufacturers we examined:

IDEXX Laboratories (FY 2016) - 12.7% of revenue spent on sales and marketing, 10.9% revenue growth year-over-year

Johnson & Johnson (FY 2016) - 27.7% of revenue spent on sales, marketing and administrative, 2.6% revenue growth year-over-year

Promoting Education

In the 2016 Cost of Recruiting an Undergrad Student Report, higher ed consulting group Ruffalo Noel Levitz reported that four-year private institutions spend a median of $2,232 per new student. We looked at the numbers for a few publicly held education companies, including Grand Canyon University, a for-profit school; Strayer Education, an education holding company; and Bright Horizons, a child care and early education provider. Note that each organization categorized marketing expenses differently.

Grand Canyon University (FY 2016) - 11.1% spent on marketing, promotional and advertising, 12.2% revenue growth year-over-year

Strayer Education (FY 2016) - 17.9% of revenues spent on marketing, 1.53% revenue growth year-over-year

Bright Horizons (FY 2016) - 10.4% spent on selling, general and administrative, 7.64% revenue growth year-over-year

Where is the Marketing Money Being Spent

Although the amount businesses spend may vary, how and where the money is being spent is pretty consistent: digital. "Marketing leaders spent more on their websites, digital commerce and digital advertising than on other categories in 2016," reported Gartner. "Marketers spent 9% of their budgets on websites, the most out of 14 spend categories surveyed."

Similarly, spend on content marketing has been increasing for years and continues to do so. According to the B2B Content Marketing report:

More than 70% of respondents agreed they can demonstrate, with metrics, how content marketing has increased audience engagement and their number of leads.

The average percentage of total marketing budget spent on content marketing is 26% (among all respondents); the most successful, however, spend 40%, while the least successful spend 14%.

38% of all respondents expect their content marketing budget to increase in the next 12 months.

Overall, companies are spending money on marketing because it matters to the bottom line. The amount each company spends differs according to a number of factors including business type, revenue and growth goals, but the message is clear: Unless you are Apple, spending less than 10% of your revenue isn't going to cut it. In order to see growth, companies, especially companies in their growth phase, need to invest heavily in the mechanism that promotes, sells and creates this growth. That mechanism is marketing.

If you need help defining your budget and establishing a marketing strategy that works, creating measurable results and driving growth, give us a shout.

Here is the complete infographic for your viewing pleasure:
Sources:
All the data in this report has been rounded to the nearest whole number and derived from 2017 annual reports (if 2017 data was not available we used the 2016 10-K data).

Bottomline Technologies 2017 Annual Report: https://www.bottomline.com/application/files/5115/0764/8891/2017-Annual-Report.pdf

As the Digital Marketing Content Manager, Sarah creates blog posts, eBooks and other digital content on behalf of Vital's B2B and B2C clients. She is a writer, editor and strategist who specializes in SaaS-based content. Message her at Sarah@vtldesign.com or @SarahBrady316 on Twitter.

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What Percent of Revenue to Spend on Marketing Budget?

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In the mid 90s, Steve Jobs took a company on the brink of extinction and turned it into the largest and most successful brand in the world. The Apple of the 90s looks a whole lot shinier today, sitting pretty at the top of Forbes most valuable brands list for the seventh year in a row.

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Gartner's marketing spending research shows 18% of overall budget invested in the customer experience to drive differentiation, innovation and profitable growth. Use our survey findings to see how your marketing and digital marketing expense, capital and innovation budgets compare.