The Promodo marketing team in Ukraine conducted research on how Ukrainian businesses used digital marketing in 2016. Our team received feedback from 215 companies representing retail (20% of respondents), IT/telecommunications (15%), advertising (9%), services (8%), education (7%), HoReCa (5%), and other. The questionnaire was filled in by marketers (34%), business owners (32%), top level managers (22%), and other experts.
Now, the results are ready and we hasten to inform you about the most interesting findings. The full text of the report is available here (in English) and here (in Russian).
Digital Marketing Instruments
The most popular marketing activities performed by the companies included:
• Maintaining a page on social networks (89% of the respondents mentioned this);
• Search engine optimization (77%);
• Contextual advertising (75%).
The two latter activities were reported as the most effective lead-generation tools.
The most popular social networks were Facebook (93% of the respondents used it for advertising), Vkontakte (55%), and Instagram (50%). While most companies had internal teams responsible for social networks and content generation; SEO, contextual advertising, and other complex instruments were outsourced. The most popular forms of created content were an expert article (74%) and video (40%).
Among the complex instruments, companies also used
- • Reputation management,
- • Native adverting,
- • Price aggregators,
- • Programmatic,
- • Metasearch,
- • SMS,
- • Teaser ads,
- • Opinion leaders,
- • Crowd-marketing.
The most popular contextual advertising instruments used by the Ukrainian companies included posting and targeting on social media, search advertising, and search engine optimization.
The mobile trend was considered by most companies: 80% optimized their websites for mobile and 52% launched advertising optimized for mobile devices. This is justified since 50% of the companies received from 20 to 50% of traffic from mobile devices.
Effectiveness and Budgets
78% of companies measured the effectiveness of online marketing by a number of new clients. 58% of the respondents reported that they aimed for increasing conversions on their websites. The most effective client-generating channels were search advertising, search engine optimization, and targeting on social media.
75% of companies increased their digital marketing budgets in 2016. 45% of them spent more than 60% of their advertising budgets on digital marketing. However, less than a half (43%) of the respondents were satisfied with the results they received. The possible reasons for that are a lack of budget, lack of knowledge, and lack of strategy.
Either way, 47% of businesses were planning to increase digital marketing budgets by more than 20% in 2017.
Wrap Up
The general conclusion is that the Ukrainian businesses use many instruments of digital marketing. Still, there is a room for improving digital marketing strategies.
The problem is that only 27% of companies calculated ROI of their marketing campaigns. This means that they do not understand the effectiveness of digital marketing. At the same time, 63% of businesses indicated that they used only standard Web analytics reports.
Obviously, companies should pay more attention to omnichannel and cross-device conversions and measure them correctly.
If you have any questions regarding the presented results or need help with your digital marketing campaign, contact our representative.
About the Authors
Promodo team
Marketing department
I am reading this in 2020. I hope this will work for me as well since a lot has changed. I will apply it and if it did work me I will ley you you and will let others also know.