How Marketers Are Spending Their Money in 2023 (We Asked 8032 Marketers)

With the economy up in the air due to inflation kicking into high gear, war, interest rates rising, and other factors that we can’t control we decided it would be great to see how other marketers are reacting.

And we didn’t want to know how marketers were reacting just in the U.S., we wanted to know on a global scale what businesses of all sizes in all major industries (and for both B2B and B2C) are doing.

So, at my ad agency, NP Digital, we decided to leverage our traffic, email lists, and relationships to conduct a wide survey so not only could see what other marketers are doing but to also understand the “why” behind their decisions.

Here’s what we found out.

Earned Media

Let’s look closely at each earned media channel to see how budgets are being reallocated.

SEO

68% of companies surveyed said they are increasing their SEO budget. The number 1 response on why they are making this is shift is because they said it provides a higher ROI than paid advertising. Which is true… it just takes longer to see results.

11% said they would maintain their SEO budget going into 2023. The number 1 response on why is because there wasn’t much flexibility with their overall marketing spend due to economic reasons.

As for the 21% that said they were decreasing… it was a toss-up on why between two main responses.

The first was that SEO wasn’t producing results and the second was that the marketing team is having to make cuts to meet their reduced budget.

Organic Social Media

32% of companies are planning on increasing their organic social media budget. The primary response was because of the Apple IOS changes, and they aren’t able to spend as much as they want on paid social media.

26% said they would keep their budget as is with the main reason being that you have to be on the major platforms in order to communicate with customers and potential customers.

A whopping 42% said they would decrease due to organic reach continually declining and organic social media not providing as high of an ROI as it used to.

If you are facing a decline in organic reach, watch this:

Content

83% of companies are increasing their content production budget. The number 1 response on why was due to the need to create content in multiple formats including video and the cost associated with it.

8% said they would maintain their budget. The main reason why was the economic situation limiting their ability to spend more.

And 9% said they are decreasing their content creation budget due to AI tools helping them create content more affordably.