5 interesting stats to start your week
Nearly half of businesses plan to expand their marketing teams this year
Over two in five (41%) businesses intend to expand their internal marketing teams in 2024, despite persisting economic uncertainty.
Digital marketing agency Impression surveyed 1,000 marketing professionals and almost three-quarters (73%) of them expect their businesses to grow this year.
While expectations for growth are strong, an increase in marketing budgets is not necessarily expected in line with this. Less than half (47%) of respondents say they expect marketing budgets to increase in 2024.
Brands are also directing their efforts and budget into bottom of the funnel activity. Almost three in ten (28%) of the marketers surveyed say their business is focusing their efforts on conversion and driving sales and leads, versus 26% who report their organisation is focused on driving brand awareness and attraction.
Around 20% say customer retention and loyalty is their biggest focus, with a similar proportion (21%) saying their businesses efforts are split equally between brand building, bottom of the funnel activity and retention.
Source: Impression
Consistency between out of home and TV ads drives better effectiveness scores
Brands should aim to build consistency between their out of home (OOH) advertising and TV ads, suggests research from System1 and JCDecaux UK.
The research finds that out of home ads matching their TV counterparts perform twice as well on brand fluency, according to System1’s Test Your Ad platform, which looks at emotional responses to ads.
Out of home ads aligned with their TV equivalents score an average of 62% on two-second brand recognition, which measures the strength and speed of brand recognition, compared to 30% for OOH ads that didn’t align with TV creative.
OOH ads with TV counterparts also performed better on System1’s other measures, namely its star rating, which predicts the long-term brand