Internet marketing spending increases, again

As businesses begin to reflect on the past year and start looking toward 2012, many will reevaluate where they focus their advertising dollars. Even today, neither print nor internet marketing have prevailed. While there are more companies looking toward online marketing, thus far the dollars and cents are, for the most part, equally distributed across media outlets.

In 2010, the United States advertising and marketing spending was an estimated $368 billion, according to the Financial Times. Further broken down, online media advertising was an estimated $119.6 billion, while print media ended at $111.5 billion.

Truthfully, there are advantages to using both to develop a campaign. However, in the long run it seems that online marketing will come out on top. If not for its low cost, than for its ability to present new opportunities for small businesses. For example, according to AdBean, the top 200 advertisers account for 80 percent of marketing spending, and overwhelms the top 100 publishers, which makes it much harder for small businesses to infiltrate those heavily trafficked publications. So, while there is a lot of diversified advertising spending, it is in concentrated markets and industries.

Small businesses are able to gain greater exposure through the internet. Some great examples are LivingSocial and Facebook. Through those platforms, smaller organizations are able to market their services in a cost-effect manner and, in some cases, offer deals that encourage consumers to spend their money with them.

While it is easy to look at the positive aspects of online marketing, many business owners agree that the quality of online content is not up to par with printed publications, which can prevent many viewers from fully eliminating newspapers, magazines or direct mail marketing from their daily routine. In part, the lack of meaningful content online today has prevented marketing campaigns from going fully digital. In order to combat that concern, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics have become widely incorporated into online marketing techniques. With a further global reach, even the smallest companies would be able to infiltrate large markets if they successful manage their online presence with SEO.

As of today, neither internet nor print marketing has been able to garner the name of the ultimate medium with new technologies, though, experts unanimously agree that the future lies on a computer screen, which means that now more than ever it is necessary for print publications to embrace the internet.