• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 18, 2018

BIA Advisory Services released on Thursday its 2018 Survey of Advertising and Marketing report, which suggests that businesses with 500 or more employees spend on average $4.48 million for advertising and $2.18 million on promotions. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. businesses invest their marketing dollars in local media ad platforms, with the remainder spent on promotions.

The 2018 U.S. SAM survey uses a sample of 1,500 businesses with local advertising and promotions -- including local, regional and national businesses -- for insights into historical and marketing practices. It also covers current and future spend of digital and online media, and how business rate their return on investment for media ranking from national TV and radio to digital and coupons.

Those businesses in the top category with 500 more employees had average total marketing -- advertising plus promotions -- budgets of $6.66 million, of which 67.3%, or $4.48 million, was spent in the past 12 months on advertising.

Businesses with between 100 and 499 employees spent an average of $259,000 in their total marketing budget, of which 61.5% was spent on advertising.

The top five media for advertising and promotions identified in the study include social ads, email, direct mail, direct home, and location on mobile.

Three major trends emerged in the study. First, social ad channels are popular for reaching targeted audience segment. About 61% of businesses advertising in local market use targeted social ads as part of their media buy.

Second, the prominence of a mobile ad channel like location awareness, which about 35.5% of companies use to target audiences based on geofencing or geotargeting.

Finally, each of the top five media channels offer deep targeting -- whether individual targeting as with email, about 49.3%, and direct mail at 37.6%, or with household targeting with direct home at about 35.7% media such as door hangers.