61% of companies’ name “growing SEO” as their biggest priority in 2018

Just 61% of 6,399 global professionals believe their marketing strategy is effective, with many putting SEO as their top priority for 2018, according to new research.

Online marketing and SEO firm Reboot sought to investigate how companies feel toward marketing in 2018 – establishing what is a priority, challenge and trend.

Key findings include:

• 61% of 6,399 professionals believe their digital marketing is “effective.”
• Generating website traffic/leads: This year’s biggest marketing challenge.
• Growing SEO/organic presence: The top marketing priority in 2018.
• Paid advertising named “most over-rated” marketing tactic.

To achieve this, Reboot extracted data from the report State of Inbound by HubSpot. It revealed, it is likely marketers will focus first on converting leads into customers (70%) and growing traffic to their website (55%.) To achieve this, global professionals will observe the following digital marketing priorities in 2018:

1. Growing SEO/organic presence – 61%
2. Blog content creation – 53%
3. Content distribution and amplification – 47%
4. Marketing automation – 40%
5. Interactive content creation – 38%

The most over-rated marketing tactics, and therefore the least priority, were defined as: paid advertising (print, outdoor, broadcast) – 32%, social media organic – 13% and online paid advertising (social media ads, PPC) – 11%.

However, with change comes challenge. Echoing their priorities, marketers today have expressed they feel “generating traffic and leads” (63%) to be their biggest challenge, followed by proving ROI (return on investment) – at 40%, and securing budget (28%) for marketing programs. The full five 2018 digital marketing challenges denoted as:

1. Generating traffic and leads – 63%
2. Proving the ROI of marketing activities – 40%
3. Securing budget – 28%
4. Identifying the “right technologies” – 26%
5. Managing the company website – 26%

Alongside this, global professionals identified the main disruptors in marketing – moving into 2018 – to be: Artificial intelligence (A.I.), Virtual Reality (V.R.) and social platforms.
Interestingly, just 61% of company respondents are happy with their marketing strategy, and believe it is effective. To combat this, Reboot chose to look at five effective marketing swaps to transform your business in 2018. Press information for immediate release Reboot

View an infographic from Reboot Online outlining the data below: