• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, February 27, 2020

Across the country, top marketers plan to increase their mobile budgets by 73% over the next five years.

That’s according to a survey of 265 marketing executives sponsored by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Of course, the degree to which marketing execs are bullish on mobile depends on their business sector.

More aggressive that most categories, marketing leaders in the healthcare sector say they expect to double their share of spending on mobile over the next five years.

Despite the expected increases in spend, the researchers say they see continued slow gains of mobile marketing’s contributions to company performance, with business-to-consumer companies reporting the strongest contribution.

Companies that sell at least 10% of their products or services online are most likely to recognize the most mobile contributions to company performance.

Companies cite social ads and user experience as the highest spend in mobile, and note that difficulty tracking the customer across the mobile journey is the factor most limiting their success in mobile.

Companies are now spending 13% of their marketing budgets on social media, which is expected to rise to 21.5% in the next five years.

Currently, outside agencies perform nearly a quarter of all social media activities, which is the highest level reported since the researchers began posing the question to marketers in 2014.

Consistent with this trend, marketers are reporting a drop in the number of people employed in-house to perform social media activities, from an average of about four people in February 2014, to about three people at present.

Partly explaining this trend, social media continues to be rated as contributing only moderate value to company performance.

At the same time, the researchers detected an increased ability by companies to demonstrate social media’s impact on performance. In fact, 30% of marketers now report the ability to prove the impact quantitatively, which is up from 18% in 2017.

More broadly, optimism among marketers continues to climb after hitting its lowest point of the past eight years in early 2019.

Fueling these gains in optimism have been a decline in “less optimistic” marketers, who dropped almost in half (from 56.2% to 30%), from last year.