During a survey, ***** percent of responding marketers from the United Kingdom stated they were going to increase their spending on paid social media marketing in 202; paid Google marketing ranked second with ***** percent.

In a survey conducted between January and February 2022, over ** percent of responding marketers from the United Kingdom indicated that they had invested in data analytics to improve digital marketing in 2021; only **** percent of responders invested in improving their app.

According to a survey conducted in December 2021 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ** percent of responding senior company decision-makers stated that they used local SEO management in relation to their physical marketing activities and locations. Another ** percent stated that inventory promotion and social media posting were additional digital activities that their companies do in order to achieve hybrid customer experiences.

During a survey conducted among marketing professionals from the United States in January 2021, **** percent of respondents stated that they believed that the contribution of digital marketing to their company's performance was very high.

During a November 2021 survey carried out among marketers from ** countries worldwide, ** percent of respondents stated that driving decision-making with customer insights was one of the leading challenges they faces with digital advertising. Attributing marketing performance to individual programs, campaigns, or channels ranked second, named by ** percent of respondents.

A 2021 survey of global SMS found that **** percent of respondents believed that e-mail marketing was the most effective id driving sales for them. At the same time, **** percent of SMBs thought that social media marketing was best at driving sales.

During a 2021 survey carried out among small businesses in the United States, ** percent of respondents stated that they paid for digital advertising. The average spending amounted to***4 U.S. dollars monthly, and ** percent were planning to keep or increase it over the following 12 months.

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, approximately 83 percent selected increased exposure as a benefit of social media marketing. Increased traffic followed, mentioned by 73 percent of the respondents, while 65 percent cited generated leads.

              The multibillion-dollar social media ad industry

              Between 2019 – the last year before the pandemic – and 2024, global social media advertising spending skyrocketed by 140 percent, surpassing an estimated 230 billion U.S. dollars in the latter year. That figure was forecast to increase by nearly 50 percent by the end of the decade, exceeding 345 billion dollars in 2029. As of 2024, the social media networks with the most monthly active users were Facebook, with over three billion, and YouTube, with more than 2.5 billion.

              Pros and cons of GenAI for social media marketing

              According to another 2024 survey, generative artificial intelligence's (GenAI) leading benefits for social media marketing according to professionals worldwide included increased efficiency and easier idea generation. The third place was a tie between increased content production and enhanced creativity. All those advantages were cited by between 33 and 38 percent of the interviewees. As for GenAI's top challenges for global social media marketing,
              maintaining authenticity and the value of human creativity ranked first, mentioned by 43 and 40 percent of the respondents, respectively. Another 35 percent deemed ensuring the content resonates as an obstacle.

During a 2024 survey among marketers worldwide, around 86 percent reported using Facebook for marketing purposes. Instagram and LinkedIn followed, respectively mentioned by 79 and 65 percent of the respondents.

              The global social media marketing segment

              According to the same study, 59 percent of responding marketers intended to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes throughout that year. LinkedIn and Instagram followed with similar shares, rounding up the top three social media platforms attracting a planned growth in organic use among global marketers in 2024. Their main driver is increasing brand exposure and traffic, which led the ranking of benefits of social media marketing worldwide.

              Social media for B2B marketing

              Social media platform adoption rates among business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers vary according to each subsegment's focus. While B2C professionals prioritize Facebook and Instagram – both run by Meta, Inc. – due to their popularity among online audiences, B2B marketers concentrate their endeavors on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn due to its goal to connect people and companies in a corporate context.

In 2021, the market for artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing was estimated at ***** billion U.S. dollars. The source projected that the value would increase to more than ***** billion by 2028. What is AI and who uses it? Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most impactful digital innovations of the past few decades. The term refers to the ability of a computer or machine to mimic the competencies of the human mind, with the current ecosystem consisting of machine learning, robotics, artificial neural networks, and natural language processing. All of these features and algorithms are highly versatile and adaptable to the specific requirements of the user, explaining why they have become embedded into many different industries, ranging from telecommunications and financial services to healthcare and pharma. Overall, the global artificial intelligence market was valued at around *** billion U.S. dollars in 2021. AI at the marketing wheel AI is deeply embedded into the digital marketing landscape, and based on the latest reports, more than ** percent of industry experts integrate some form of AI technology into their online marketing activities. This vast adaptation of artificial intelligence for marketing purposes is no surprise considering that its benefits include task automation, campaign personalization, and data analysis, to name but a few. When asked about marketers' main application areas of AI in a recent survey, roughly ** percent of respondents from the U.S., Canada, the UK, and India mentioned ad targeting. Other popular activities they trusted AI with included personalizing content, optimizing e-mail send times, and calculating conversion probability.

During an early 2023 survey among marketing leaders from for-profit companies in the United Kingdom, respondents reported that, on average, digital marketing budgets increased by ***** percent in 2022. In 2021, the growth rate was ***** percent.

Egypt had the highest growth in digital advertising spending in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2021, followed by Morocco and Tunisia. However, Qatar, Jordan and Algeria had the lowest growth in digital advertising spending. Meanwhile, Lebanon, Oman and Kuwait had negative change in digital advertising spending in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

It is projected that digital advertising expenditures in the United States will increase by nearly ** percent between 2025 and 2029. In that five years period U.S. digital ad spend will grow from *** to *** billion dollars. These figures will represent roughly ** percent of global digital ad spending, which is expected to reach some *** billion U.S. dollars in 2027, up from the *** billion recorded in 2021. Mobile advertising in the U.S. With mobile growing in strength, sources predict that it will account for the lion’s share of total digital spending in the United States. In 2023, roughly *** billion U.S. dollars is forecast to be spent on mobile ads in the country. Sometime in early 2017 a clear change was seen in allocation of marketing dollars, when U.S. industry professionals started increasing the share of their budgets devoted to mobile marketing. Since then, a growing focus on this medium is evident. While mobile advertising is becoming more popular, marketers still have some concerns with its execution, mainly when it comes to data quality and sourcing, as well as measurement issues. All in all, those who decided to spend on mobile have been shifting away from display ads and towards video advertising since early 2018.

In 2021, the digital advertising market in Southeast Asia was valued at around ***** billion U.S. dollars. Estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of **** percent, the region's market was projected to reach around ***** billion U.S. dollars in 2031.

During a January 2024 global survey among marketers, nearly 60 percent reported plans to increase their organic use of YouTube for marketing purposes in the following 12 months. LinkedIn and Instagram followed, respectively mentioned by 57 and 56 percent of the respondents intending to use them more. According to the same survey, Facebook was the most important social media platform for marketers worldwide.

In 2024, digital pure players (companies that operate primarily online, such as Google or Amazon) generated an advertising revenue of *** billion U.S. dollars worldwide. In 2025, their ad revenue is forecast to amount to *** billion dollars.

During a 2021 survey carried out among senior marketers from the United States, ** percent of respondents stated that third-party cookies were very important for their current marketing strategy as they made up a majority of the data their company used. On the other hand, ** percent stated they never used third-party cookie data and this the cookie were not important for them at all.

In 2021, spending on digital advertising to children stood at *** billion U.S. dollars worldwide. Between 2021 and 2031, it is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly ** percent to reach **** billion dollars. Kids digital ad spending data by region reveals that North America (Canada, Mexico, and the United States) was the largest investor in this field, accounting for ** percent of the total, followed by Europe with ** percent, and Asia-Pacific with ** percent.

As of February 2025, it was found that around 14.1 percent of TikTok's global audience were women between the ages of 18 and 24 years, while male users of the same age formed approximately 16.6 percent of the platform's audience. The online audience of the popular social video platform was further composed of 14.6 percent of female users aged between 25 and 34 years, and 20.7 percent of male users in the same age group.

A survey conducted on digital marketing in India in 2021, indicated that social media was the most commonly used format of content marketing as reported by ** percent of the respondents. Blogs and newsletters were the next most popular content marketing format. Contrariwise, only * percent of marketers reported using research reports and white papers for their content marketing strategies during this period.