Telecos Are Spending 46% Of Marketing Dollars On Digital Marketing: 84% Planning To Increase It Further !

Mobiles have played a significant role in the revolution of the digital marketing and one of the illustrations for the above transformation is the recent survey report by Adobe which showed that about 71 percent of tablet and mobile phone owners accessed their social media accounts from their mobile devices. Sometime back, we had presented a mix of many reports from reputed firms who analyzed digital marketing trends which can provide a clear idea of the market spending on this sector.

The mobile era has provided a better business interaction for the entrepreneurs with the consumers and telecom companies have definitely played an immense role in this. A recent report published by Econsultancy and Adobe titled “Digital Marketing in the Telecom Sector” provided an insight about the key trends, opportunities and the challenges for the teleco industry pertaining to the digital strategies. The research was based on a global survey of more than 200 telecom company executives located mainly in North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.

The Big Data turning out to be really big for the telecos

The report deduced that digital marketing is a strategic preference for the telecos and the ratio of telecom marketing budgets devoted to digital as compared to companies across other sectors is 23:19. In addition to this, the report also revealed that 84% of the telecom executives projected to escalate digital marketing technology spend over the next year in contrast to 70% across all sectors. The reason for this free flow of funds to digital is not arduous to guess because Telecom companies are the ones that account for gigantic data due to people signing up contracts with them to use their network, hence they see this big data as a huge opportunity to make their organization more capable, competent and competitive. The further unlocking of the value of this big data can be done by connecting the platforms of integrated marketing. The US seemed to so far supersede EMEA in integrated marketing; 64% of US marketers acclaiming that they were able to feature the inputs of the marking industry across various channels as compared to 35% of EMEA respondents accepting the same.

Although the stats figured that the customer experience and satisfaction is the best way to take a lead in differentiating businesses from their competitors (20%) but the survey gleaned that telecom industry didn’t give this factor the same importance (15%) which was no less than a surprise.

Content and Display- hot favorite segment of investment in digital

Adding more to the lines of the preferred investments of the telecom sector, nearly 66% of the survey respondents said that they intended to hike their expenditure in content marketing. With 62% respondents, the next to follow in this investment list was the segment of online display, which can be presumed to lure in greater returns for the endorsers due to the better implication of the first and third-party data to target ads. This data analysis of the budget spendings was in alignment with the revelations of the annual Marketing Budgets Report, published by Econsultancy  in the month of February this year. The respondents also agreed that their main focus would be on the use of apps as the primary channel to engage with mobile users and this has been already visible by the increasing use of Third party mobile apps among the user base of Twitter and Facebook.

Technology and Skill Gap-The major staggering factors

The worrying aspect in the expansion of the digital technology of the telecos which was outlined in the report was the lack of newer technological reforms. Two in five (44%) respondents only told that they had the ability to utilize technology to its full extent, while another 31% saw their implementation as an issue. Although the market competitors of this industry are still half way to acknowledge this apt tech-quotient hence the worry factor involved for the telecos is still very less and an increased spending in the digital markets would help to a great extent in tackling this issue yet this in no sense is a guaranteed solution.

Therefore the marketers need to have clear blueprint and a well-defined plan of action which would help the organizations to form a far-reaching progression of integrated tools and platforms.