Digital market is changing rapidly, new media platforms emerge from time to time. How should marketer plan for marketing programs in coming future to maximize the effectiveness? To understand advertisers’ view on 2018 online promotional strategy, New iMedia had conducted a survey via email. After analysis, we found 2 major advertising trend as follow:
- The online advertising budget will further increase in 2018. According to the survey result, the allocation of average online advertising budget and traditional advertising budget is about 50% – 50% respectively in 2017. In 2018, the percentage of online advertising budget will be raised to 67% on average.

- In 2018, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Ad are continued to be the hottest promotional channels, over 40% of the entire budget will be allocated to these channels. Moreover, it’s noteworthy that there is a drastic increment in the entire online budget portion for “Social Media Ad” and “Content Marketing”, this reveals more advertisers will adapt the soft-sell advertising in future. Combining “Content Marketing” and “Social Media Ad” with “Search Engine Marketing” would help to facilitate the purchase decision and the brand awareness.

Advertisers will focus more on online in 2018, while new platforms keep changing the advertising industry. Although there is an uptrend in Content Marketing, Search Engine Marketing is still dominant in the process of information searching in the customer journey.