Published on the 18/11/2014 | Written by Beverley Head

There has been a surge in confidence regarding digital marketing from professionals in Australia and New Zealand…

A survey of 115 Australian and New Zealand marketing professionals has revealed growing appetite for digital marketing investment, although offline still holds the lion’s share.

Jane Briggs, director of First Point Research and Consulting, said that compared to a similar survey conducted a year ago marketing professionals now rated their digital marketing skills more highly and were more confident about their digital strategy with regard to B2C marketing. Confidence in B2B digital marketing was still lagging however.

Briggs said that part of the B2C confidence probably came from the fact that more marketers were now able to measure the return on investment of their digital campaigns, and also had a more sophisticated approach in that they were using digital marketing to achieve conversions to online sales and for site optimisation, rather than simply drive website traffic.

“It’s not just a finger in the wind sort of thing,” said Briggs. “It’s more about lead generation – not just visitors to a website.”

About 90 percent of marketers report measuring the ROI of digital campaigns, up from 80 percent a year ago, but B2B campaigns are not as rigorously measured as B2C projects according to the research.

The survey, Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing, was commissioned by customer experience management business Sitecore.

This year’s survey found that offline marketing spending still outweighed digital spending by more than 50 percent – but future momentum seems to be with digital marketing.

There are however barriers; 59 percent of B2B marketers felt constrained by the overall budget available to them compared to 34 percent of B2C specialists.

Executive support could also dampen enthusiasm – 34 percent of B2B marketers felt they lacked executive support for digital marketing initiatives compared to 14 percent of their B2C colleagues.

Nevertheless B2B marketers still invest more of their overall marketing budget in digital initiatives than do their B2C colleagues.

According to respondents the major priority for marketers in 2015 is to make better use of big data particularly for marketing automation, content profiling and integration with the customer records management system.