52% are considering moving their budget away from paid advertising efforts to owned and earned content creation, while 30% are already doing so

Bazaarvoice, Inc., the leading provider of product reviews and user-generated content (UGC) solutions, released its latest research, based on a survey of more than 500 budget holders and decision makers from brands, retailers, and agencies. The report explores how brands and retailers are increasingly evaluating their channel mix, especially as recession looms. As businesses focus on maximizing ROI and ROAS (return on advertising spend), optimizing their channel and content mix with a balance of paid and organic will become absolutely business critical.

“We’ve seen that by using UGC in our social media advertising, we’ve been able to reduce our cost per click by 60% whilst driving higher click through rates,” said Alister Dell, Digital Marketing Manager at Hardys Wine.

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Global survey highlights include:

• Paid, owned, and earned media programs are being managed separately: Currently, a quarter of respondents said that their paid, earned and owned budgets are all separate
• People don’t know how effective their paid media efforts are: 48% said they feel like they can only somewhat gauge how successful their paid advertising activities are
• A shift is happening: 52% are considering moving their budget away from paid advertising efforts to owned and earned content creation, while 30% are already doing so
• It’s likely to be a considerable one: 47% are considering moving 10% or more of their budget to owned and earned content creation, away from paid advertising efforts
• Consumer content is being prioritized: 86% said that believe that more authentic UGC in their paid and owned media would improve the performance of their ads and content
• The recession is affecting budgets: 61% said their budget will be impacted by the recession, while 20% are unsure
• Many will be slashed: 81% said they will be expected to reduce marketing dollar spend
• Teams are impacted too: 34% said they will be expected to reduce headcount within their team
• As a result, ROI is a huge focus: 73% of respondents said they are targeted on improving the ROI of their marketing dollars

“For years, brands have always leaned on paid channels to amplify branded content, tactics, and offers,” said Zarina Lam Stanford, Bazaarvoice CMO. “In fact, more than $700B was spent on paid advertising alone in 2022. Now we are seeing a rebalancing to optimize the marketing mix modeling (MMM) as consumers are yearning for organic content from other shoppers i.e. earned and shared content and channels.”

Research methodology
The research was commissioned by Bazaarvoice and conducted in November 2022 by Savanta among 502 budget holders and decision makers from brands, retailers, and agencies from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.

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