MediaBuyerPlanner has the breakdown of the recent 2008 State of the Marketer report.  Highlights include:

Online advertising spend is expected grow at a rapid rate, with 90 percent of marketers saying they will continue to increase their direct online advertising budgets - and 15 percent saying they will “radically” increase online ad spend.

Moreover, some 78 percent of marketers say they will increase their social media spend; 74 percent say they will increase their direct email spend; and 65 percent say they will increase their mobile texting/SMS spend.

Overall, more than 40 percent of marketers have radically increased their budgets for online advertising from three years ago.

If you haven’t already figured it out, big business is moving online in a big way in the next half decade.  What this means for the traditional marketing mediums of newspaper and magazine, I’m not sure.  However, I do know it means our marketing of auctions and real estate needs to continue to evolve towards an increased online presence.

While we’ve added a facebook page for our company, and have discussed a regular blog feature to our website, we’ve not yet begun to spend significant amounts in direct online advertising.  We do include our higher end properties in large targeted online marketing campaigns, and our smaller projects all feature targeted online marketing.  However, In order to stay competitive, and ahead of the curve, it will increasingly become important to move our marketing dollars from newspaper and magazine mediums to online mediums.

To illustrate this point, our website has received over 18,000 unique visitors in the past 9 months.  Of this traffic 30% came directly to the site.  The other 70% came to the site either by a search engine or referral from another web site.  In fact, our top five traffic sources are: Google (31% of all traffic - with 8 of the top 10 search words our business name or an iteration of the name); direct traffic (30%); midwestauctions.com (5% - an online auction portal where all our auctions are advertised); kstp.com (5% - a television story in which I was interviewed concerning the auction of the Armstrong-Quinlan Mansion); and oldhouses.com (4% - an online ad campaign for the Armstrong-Quinlan auction).

If we spend 70% of our marketing dollars in print media that drives 30% of our online traffic, and 30% of our marketing dollars in online media that drives 70% of our online traffic, what would the results be if flipped the spending?  Would we drive the growth of our business?  Would we reach an entirely new clientele that would sustain our growth, and push our company to the next level?

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