Statistics Revealed: Which is the most-used digital marketing platform?

If you’re in the process of launching a new online business, you’ve probably started to plan how to allocate your digital marketing budget. But as a new company, how do you know which online channels to spend your resources on? In this article, Primal will dive into three main types of digital media: SEO, Paid Media, and Social Media Content. We’ll also provide statistics and analysis that reveal which industries are utilising which online channels.

Let’s see what the numbers tell us.

Online Marketing via SEO

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is one of the top digital marketing tools that many businesses are now interested in. Its goal is to boost the ranking of a website on search engines, like Google, when a user searches for specific keywords that appear on your website. SEO is considered an “organic” way of growing your business since you do not pay the search engine for a better ranking.

Your website is your digital storefront, displaying information about your products and/or services for anyone to come in and see. But in order to get your target customers to visit, you need to let them know you are there when they are searching for you. To reach a level where you are one of the first websites displayed when a customer is searching for your products or services, you need strong SEO. 

That is easier said than done, as you need both time and a professional team to keep monitoring and improving your sites. SEO needs to be done continually to achieve long-term benefits; if you pause your SEO activities, your competitors may overtake your ranking in the search engine results pages.

The following graph illustrates the top 3 industries using SEO:

Graph Digital statistics| top 3 industries using SEO

Top 3 Industries Using SEO

  1. Serviced apartments and Hotels 15%
  2. Beauty 11%
  3. Finance and Insurance 8%

Others 66%

Online Marketing via Paid Media

Paid media is the most popular online marketing channel because it can be conveniently implemented for immediate results, but that convenience can come at a high cost. When you buy ad space on a website, video, or other platforms, you will reach a larger and broader audience.  

Let’s compare paid media with SEO for a clearer understanding. You don’t have to pay for any platforms when you undertake SEO, but you do need time to continuously build and improve upon your strategy to keep pace with your competitors. In contrast, paid media doesn’t require much time to execute. You only pay (buy ads) for a specific platform and for a set amount of time. When you stop your paid media campaign, your advertisements will disappear until you start paying again. 

This is where paid media strays furthest from SEO. When you pause an SEO campaign, you may see your ranking drop, but you will still retain all your optimised content. In other words, SEO doesn’t go away. So, when comparing SEO and paid media, we can see that paid media provides much stronger, immediate returns, albeit at a higher cost. 

The following graph illustrates the top 3 industries using paid media:

Graph Digital statistics| top 3 industries using Paid media. PPC, SEM

Top 3 Industries Using Paid Media

  1. Real estate 25%
  2. Food and Beverage 14%
  3. Beauty 9%

Others 55%

Online Marketing via Social Media Content

One of the most popular channels for online marketing is social media. It is free to use, doesn’t require any advanced technical skills to operate, and can still reach a large audience. All it takes to be successful on social media is engaging creative content that encourages user interaction.  That said, social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram do offer comprehensive paid advertising options that boost content and reach new audiences.  

Nowadays, the word ‘content’ has a wide definition because social media platforms support various types of content, such as videos, articles, infographics, rich content etc. Therefore, social media content creation services are becoming a lot more popular. 

The following graph illustrates the top 3 industries using social media content:

Graph Digital statistics| top 3 industries using Social media content

Top 3 Industries Using Social Media Content

  1. Beauty 13%
  2. Finance and Insurance 13%
  3. Food and Beverage 9%

Others 65%

So, after all of that, let’s look at a complete picture of how the top 10 industries using online media are allocating their resources: 

top 10 industry using digital marketing (SEO SEM Facebook ads Google ads and content marketing))

Using this breakdown as a guide, you’ll be able to better plan your new digital media strategy. Now you can see which channels your business will need to compete in based on your industry, it’s worth noting that this information should only guide your strategy. It helps to keep an open mind and try marketing in other channels. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do digital marketing; instead, you should implement, observe, and analyse data and continually update your strategic direction. 

We hope that this information will help you make the right decision on which digital channels to use!