FreshNetworks Blog

America’s top B2B firms are embracing new media. An article from the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) suggests that more than one in three US B2B firms is spending more that 20% of their total media budget on new and digital media. This contrasts with B2C advertisers who see an average of just 5% of their media spend on new and digital media.

That B2B firms are embracing digital media faster than consumer markets is not surprising – business customers are more likely to be purchasing online at the moment and so a digital media approach to advertising makes more sense than it might do in some B2C industries. What is interesting is to dig a little deeper into the study behind WARC’s report.

The data comes from a survey of 145 B2B firms in the US, conducted by Association of National Advertisers and BtoB Magazine. This sample size is quite small and so whilst the statistics reported are interesting, I’m more interested at digging into the qualitative comment.

The survey results enables a segmentation of new and digital media techniques into a top tier of things that are currently attracting the bulk of spend, a middle tier of things that are set to attract the bulk of spend in the future and a bottom tier of things that are growing (possibly growing quickest) but will never take the bulk of spending. What falls where in this analysis is interesting for us all.

• Top tier: includes own website, email marketing, online advertising, SEO and search engine marketing
• Middle tier: includes blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts and video-on-demand
• Bottom tier: includes wiki’s, mobile, viral video, social networking and second life

So, whilst the top tier is where spend is now, and the middle tier where spend is next, it will be spotting the future trends from the bottom tier where we’ll see the fastest growth in B2B spend in the longer term.