How do Companies Use the Digital Marketing in Egypt?
The 5 Must-Know Mega Questions about How Companies Use the Digital Marketing in Egypt …
No one can be questioning now if companies use the digital marketing or no, the question had become how do they use it? Thus, eMarketing Egypt latest report: Digital Marketing Insights 2018; had included a survey of more than 425 companies in Egypt to investigate their practices and benchmarks when using the digital marketing.
In fact; the report includes dozens of findings and insights but all of them can be grouped in five mega questions:
- Do companies in Egypt benefit from digital marketing in meeting their key marketing priorities?
As a starting point; we reviewed the top marketing priorities for the surveyed companies. The results showed that 92% of companies consider “Acquiring New Customers” as their most important priority, followed by 80% mentioning “Retaining Current Customers”. However, when it comes to digital marketing strategic role; the ranking shows different story where the majority mentioned digital marketing to be “very useful” for “Acquiring New Customers”, but it was limited as mentioned only by 53% of companies.
- How do companies in Egypt organize their digital marketing operations?
Companies may choose to run all digital marketing activities in-house, or to outsource it, or to combine both in-house and outsourcing operations. The findings showed that about 72% of the surveyed companies are running digital marketing operations in-house, vs. 9% are outsourcing digital marketing operations. This high tendency to run in-house digital marketing operations becomes more striking finding with the notation that only 14% of companies have a dedicated digital marketing team with more than 5 employees.
- What are the most used digital marketing channels and for what objectives?
Social media; unsurprisingly, topped the channels used as mentioned by 97% of the surveyed companies. It is mainly used for brand awareness objectives as mentioned by 36% of them, while 20% of them use it for lead generation objectives, the remaining 44% use is to help both objectives (i.e. brand awareness and lead generation).
- How do companies in Egypt budget for their digital marketing activities?
About 50% of the surveyed companies allocate 50% or more of their marketing budgets to digital; note that digital marketing budget is a wider measure than the digital advertising expenses; it encompasses all items that relate to salaries, design, web … etc. One of the most questionable areas also when budgeting for digital marketing is the reliance on the sponsored campaigns, where it was found that 84% of the surveyed companies allocate budgets to sponsored campaigns among their digital marketing activities; moreover 33% of them rely mainly on the sponsored campaigns (more than 80% of their digital marketing activities are sponsored).
- How effective were the digital marketing channels for meeting the pursued objectives?
With view to the pursued objectives (i.e. lead generation vs. brand awareness); only 31% of companies had mentioned the social media management as “very effective” for brand awareness and 54% of them had mentioned the Search Engine Marketing (AdWord) as “very effective” for lead generation.