Search Marketing Blog
SEMPO: Search Marketing Continues to Rise
Posted by Scott Fish on 04.10.2009
This week, in a survey titled ‘2008 State of the Market‘, Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) reported that they project that the total online search marketing industry will grow almost 100% by 2013. More than 800 respondents from search engine advertisers and search marketing agencies across the globe participated in this study that was performed by Radar Research.
As we have been conveying since the inception of EngineWorks, more and more online and real-world entities continue to shift more and more marketing dollars away from traditional channels, and into ROI-driven campaigns such as Paid Search Marketing and Natural SEO engagements. This new survey from SEMPO punctuates this fact.
Important findings from SEMPO include:
SEM spending will grow from $14.7 billion in 2009 to $26.1 billion in 2013.
Local Search is still very important: “Almost a third of respondents has tried locally targeted search ads and thinks ‘it works great.’ More than three out of five marketers (62%) are willing to pay a premium of 1%-5% for local targeting, up from two in five advertisers last year.”
Video Search advertising is growing: “Some 54% of respondents said they would be interested in contextually targeted advertising attached to video search results. Two in five advertiser respondents claim they want to pay the same for video search as they’re currently paying for traditional search.”
Social Media has become mainstream: “Among advertisers doing social media marketing, more than four out of five are using Facebook to promote their brand. Digg is the second most popular social media site, with more than two-thirds of advertisers using it. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Technorati round out the most popular sites to promote brands.”
Search Engine Land also has a recap of other important results from this report, including:
- Organic SEO has always been the favored search marketing tactic among advertisers, but its popularity has risen significantly, from 80% in 2005 and 76% in 2006, nine out of ten advertisers using it the past two year.
- In the past three years, offline channels are most frequently cannibalized to move budget towards SEM. This year, the top marketing channels advertisers are shifting budgets from are print magazines (26%), direct mail (21%), and print newspapers (19%).
- However, the degree to which certain channels are cannibalized is a bit lower than in last year’s survey. Only a quarter of advertisers (26 percent) report they are shifting budgets from print magazine advertising (down from a third last year), and only 15 percent of advertisers are cannibalizing their web site development budgets. Other channels affected by a shift in spending include TV advertising (13 percent), conferences (10 percent) and print yellow pages (9 percent).
At EngineWorks, we’re very excited to see this continued growth of our industry!
In a time when budgets are tight, and growth seems hard to achieve, we are encouraged that businesses, including our world-class clients, are focusing their marketing strategies on initiatives that delivery a real return on their advertising investment.
