NEW YORK: Two thirds of brand marketers and retailers intend to increase their investment in content marketing over the next two years, a new survey has said. 

The Brand Activation Association (formerly the Promotion Marketing Association) and consultancy Booz & Co carried out in-depth interviews with 60 executives and found that 68% planned to escalate spending on this channel at a time when TV and trade promotions budgets were expected to remain flat and print to decline.

In addition, MediaPost reported that all the consumer brand manufacturers surveyed expected to see their mobile marketing spend grow and that 44% anticipated increases of more than 10%.

Increased spending on social media and shopper marketing was also near universal among this group (96%), with two thirds projecting increases of more than 5% for social media and just under half predicting a similar rise in investment for shopper marketing.

The report warned, however, that brands would need to take "a strategic view of how shopper marketing fits into the new marketing model". This would require both executive sponsorship and "a sustained commitment to overcome historically siloed behaviour in the organization".

Separately, the need to address traditional structures was also highlighted by Yvonne Chang, CEO of Yahoo SEA, who told Campaign Asia-Pacific that delivering content across platforms might seem like a simple idea, "but what it will actually mean is that the marketer is breaking down silos of media teams and turning them into one cohesive team of story tellers".

She argued that things would really start to change when brands regarded content in the same way they currently thought about products.

In a similar vein, the Brand Activation Association survey noted that marketers were beginning to create content for syndication across retailers' digital assets "to jointly engage shoppers and create higher-quality experiences that build the brand and drive conversion" and it suggested that brands could act as "digital captain" on these efforts.

Data sourced from MediaPost, Campaign Asia-Pacific; additional content by Warc staff