Marketing Pilgrim shared with us last week that Forrester is predicting huge long term growth for social media spending in online advertising. They even shared this pretty graph (ok I added the commentary,) 

Social media is a really small portion of the pretty chart because social media is largely free. Sure there is the cost of execution, but you don't pay money to be on Linkedin or Facebook. What I found amazing are the predicted growths of display advertising (banner ads) and search marketing (PPC) of 17% and 15% respectively. 

As we have learned over at HubSpot, leads that you find through inbound marketing are cheaper than those you find through outbound marketing. While Mike tells me you can get really good deals on banner ads and such, I think the rest of the world will catch on to what a good deal inbound marketing is in the next couple years. 

 Once they do, I think they are going to stop spending so much money on search marketing and display advertising and start spending more on creating great content and pushing it out through social media.  I am no marketer and I don't know where content creation cost would fall under the online marketing budget segments, but I do think inbound techniques are going to prove to be significantly more effective than the old school outbound approaches and will change the spending landscape.

 Forrester and I will be sure to keep an eye on this for you!