The digital marketing industry had a barrage of data emerge this week, with marketing research and earnings calls aplenty. Here are the six stats that particularly caught our eye.
1. CPGs go bigger on social ads
As Social Pro Daily reported, 4C Insights looked at how more than 900 brands spend more than $130 million to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Overall, the advertising and data player found that social-campaign spend is up nearly 62 percent compared with last year.
What’s particularly interesting is the huge uptick in advertising by packaged-goods brands. Check out the following infographic for a greater breakdown:
2. Insta-explosion
Instagram now has 700 million monthly users, adding 100 million such patrons in the last six months. Two-and-a-half years ago, it had 300 million monthly users. So how long until it crosses the 1-billion mark? Probably not long.
3. Up with tweeting
Twitter reported a few days ago that it’s Q1 revenue was down year over year, but the San Francisco company was happy to report that 328 million people visited the site per month, an increase of 6 percent compared to Q1 2016. It added a total of 9 million monthly users in the last 12 or so weeks.
4. Sales are under the influence
The Guardian reported that U.K.-based online fashion retailer Boohoo’ sales are up 51 percent thanks to paying Instagram influencers to market its brand. In January and February, the publication noted, Boohoo’s sales reached £295 million, which equals nearly $382 million in American currency.
5. Mobile billions
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, U.S. digital campaigns totaled $72.5 billion in 2016. That total was up almost 22 percent from the $59.6 billion advertisers spent on U.S. digital advertising in 2015. Mobile accounted for almost 51 percent ($36.6 billion) of the total in 2016, up from $20.7 billion the year before.
“Mobile is the driving force in digital media and marketing throughout 2016, and that’s because of a simple reason: Consumers are on their phones, their mobile devices all the time, so marketers with their brand dollars are following them,” said David Doty, evp and CMO at the IAB.
6. Smartphone talk
The IAB’s ads research definitely aligns with consumer behavior. For instance, per new research from Facebook IQ, 93 percent of conversations happening on mobile devices last summer.
Bonus figure: Big Data, big investments
Zeta Global just raised a ton of money—$140 million, in fact, shining a bright light on the industry’s growing emphasis on marketing clouds. Founded by John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and president of Pepsi, and David Steinberg, the New York-based firm’s software helps clients like Quaker, American Airlines and Sprint manage their data through various software-based services. The company owns a proprietary database of more than 350 million people with an average of 3,000 pieces of data per person.
“We’ll take 10,000 of our clients’ best customers and feed it in to our marketing cloud as an analytical module,” Steinberg told Adweek. “That module will figure out everything about them—demographic data, behavioral data and we then build psychographic grids automatically to our system.”
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