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Marketing budgets up, internet gets biggest increase

One in five Canadian companies increased its marketing and communications budget in the first quarter of this year, according to a survey of 270 companies released today.

The ICA-CanadaPost survey found that:

Budget increases were commonly linked to improved corporate performance, with higher sales revenues and solid demand encouraging firms to boost marketing spend higher than had been initially budgeted for at the start of the year. However, the Q1 survey also saw a rise in the number of other companies boosting spend (especially on sales promotions) in order to stimulate weaker-than-anticipated sales.

The category most-often named by companies as getting an increase in expenditure was the internet. Twenty-seven per cent of the firms surveyed are spending more online than they originally planned. “Main media” was the next most common target for additional funding, cited by 22 per cent of companies.