Marketing Budgets Spiral Toward Social

Nearly one-fifth of marketing dollars will go to social in five years

Social marketing budgets are constantly going up, according to “The CMO Survey” from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA).

Marketers were already planning on upping spend in August 2009. They have continued to increase outlays since then, with respondents in February 2010 claiming they will devote nearly one-fifth of their marketing budgets to social media in the next five years.

Percentage of marketing budgets spent on social media

Looking across sectors, business-to-business (B2B) spending is nearly in line with business-to-consumer (B2C), except in the lagging B2B products category. While B2C services were behind the game in August 2009, spending in that area has caught up and will remain in line with other outlays for the next several years. B2B product marketers will remain behind the curve over the next five years.

Social media marketing spending by B2B and B2C marketers

Notably, spending plans for every sector were higher in February 2010 than they had been just six months earlier.

Growing B2B spending on social media lines up with the general goals of B2B marketers: customer relationship management and brand-building, which respondents claim will be the highest growth areas in the next year. Social marketing, with its strength in boosting brand engagement and loyalty, is an effective medium for both purposes.

2010 Looks Brighter for Digital Media

2010 looks brighter for digital media

The digital media industry should look toward this year with cautious optimism, according to comScore.

As part of its 2009 US Digital Year in Review, comScore highlighted a number of likely digital media trends for 2010. Although many companies sought opportunities in new markets during 2009, sustained increases in consumer demand will be necessary to drive continued growth in digital advertising.

Top Digital Media Trends for 2010

• Despite a significant drop-off in growth rates, e-commerce remains a relative bright spot for retailers. New buyers continue to enter the channel, and as average spending per buyer rebounds off its 2009 lows the ecommerce channel should return to healthy growth rates. The online media channel also continues to be an important driver of offline purchase behavior, so marketers in all industries need to retain a clear focus on having an online presence, where their consumers frequently begin the purchase process.
• Social networking and social media continue to drive much of the innovation occurring around the internet today. A critical challenge remains the ability to effectively harness the marketing intelligence inherent in the way people communicate and interact with one another through the digital medium and make it actionable. Even as new capabilities emerge that leverage the “social” value of the medium, this channel already delivers substantial reach for ad campaigns and despite low click-through rates, there is measurable view-through value from these ads.
• The U.S. search market saw significant innovation from the core engines in 2009, with Bing’s growth promising to make the market more competitive. The trends to watch in 2010 include increased integration of real-time (i.e., Twitter) and vertical-specific search results as the engines seek to both improve the user experience and move the consumer more efficiently down the decision funnel.
• Online video continues to capitalize on the continued increase in media fragmentation, consumer-generated content, and a rising generation of consumers very comfortable using their computers as primary or secondary entertainment devices. As this market has emerged, higher quality video and more seamless integration of video ads are emerging and adding value to the digital advertising market, to the benefit of both advertisers and publishers.
• The digital display advertising market is innovating on several fronts right now, including the emergence of new ad units that promote higher engagement, cutting edge ad targeting techniques, the development of niche audience ad networks, and the increasing popularity of online ad exchanges to buy and sell inventory. Each of these developments is contributing to the improved allocation and effectiveness of digital ad campaigns. Marketers must maintain a critical eye on the performance of their campaigns, in relation to how both digital media and traditional media components are performing.
• With so many new smartphone models reaching the market in 2009, this year promises a rapid increase in market penetration of these devices, which likely means a corresponding uptick in mobile web usage. As more consumers turn to their mobile devices for consuming content and managing their digital lives, there is significant opportunity for innovators to deliver new value to consumers in how they use these devices. The development of mobile applications across new platforms also presents new business opportunity and monetization potential for publishers and developers alike.

Consumers Demand Engagement

Image via Wikipedia

Marketers will continue to shift dollars from traditional to digital media in 2010, but simply including online ad campaigns and social media efforts is not enough for an effective marketing mix. According to the Alterian “Annual Survey 2009” report, the maturity of digital and social media requires integration of marketing strategies. Marketers must move from a focus on siloed campaigns to an emphasis on listening to and communicating with consumers across channels.

More than one-half of marketers worldwide reported directing at least “a fair amount” of effort toward integrating their communication strategies to emphasize multichannel consumer engagement.

“The age of sending out silo campaigns is long gone,” according to the report. “The only communications tolerated by consumers are those that are appropriate, timely and relevant—regardless of channel.”

The majority of marketers surveyed recognized social media as increasingly important to the marketing mix, while 14% went as far as to call it critical for success. It is yet another channel to be incorporated into an integrated communication strategy, rather than addressed on its own. And it can provide unique insights into the consumers who can now use earned media to build brands alongside marketers.

Most marketers say they are at least “prepared enough” to take advantage of new techniques in digital and social media, but more than one-third felt minimally prepared. Staff education and training was a substantial concern.

The largest group of respondents said some of their marketing staff had the skills to implement new customer engagement strategies, but that knowledge was generally restricted to personnel in digital roles. Only 17% said most or all of their staff was prepared, although 37% planned further investments in the area.

“Engaging with customers is becoming paramount and the yardstick by which we measure those brands that survive and those that don’t,” said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian, in a statement. “Marketers now need to appeal to the individual and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis.”

Social Media Revolution: Is Social Media a Fad?

During my research I’ve come across a great video that I thought I would share with you, the video was compiled by Socialnomics09, and is called Social Media Revolution: Is Social Media a Fad?

For those business owners that have yet to consider social media as a business strategy then hopefully this will provide some insights into the On Line world of the future. This video details some facts and figures that are hard to ignore.

Please enjoy

Social Shopping and the Brand Experience

If you are a retailer or business owner I thought you’d be interested in this interview and article from E-Markerter-      

Denise Zimmerman, president and chief strategy officer of NetPlus Marketing Inc., has spent the past 18 years of her career focusing on the emerging digital landscape and best practice applications in marketing, advertising and communications. She talks to eMarketer about the different forms social commerce takes and how retailers can understand it.

eMarketer: Why do people like to follow a brand on its Facebook fan page?

Denise Zimmerman: That answer depends on the retailer you’re talking about and how they use the platform. This is an interesting challenge for retailers, too. Because of the kind of communications and messaging you’re talking about, social media demands a very intense, thoughtful plan and approach in terms of what we call brand.

And not all of them have been good at this. I think Best Buy kind of breaks the mold. Zappos certainly does. Target does. Some of your larger retailers understand and cultivate their brand, and they can tell you what their brand is. But there are a whole host of them whose marketing, for the most part, historically has reflected commodity-type marketing—price promotion and very DM-focused—which is why they initially really latched onto affiliate marketing, search marketing, pay-for-performance type stuff. But when you’re out there in terms of communicating on these sorts of platforms, you really have to consider what is your brand. Your brand could be about price.

eMarketer: How much social commerce actually takes place on Facebook?

Ms. Zimmerman: I know that just when I’m out there and I regularly check what’s going on, I connect to a lot of these folks myself. I think it’s a natural evolution. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t think so. If you successfully connect and make shopping valuable to the community in a way that’s easy and accessible and meets their needs, it’s a no-brainer.

eMarketer: Retail Websites are offering more and more social shopping features such as Facebook Connect. Do such features pose a competitive threat to social shopping sites or do they complement each other?

Ms. Zimmerman: I think they sort of complement each other. When we develop what we call a socially enabled Website, we don’t even like to call it a Website. We call it a social hub, which is really an evolution of the Website experience. So it should be really an experiential extension of the brand or of the retailer. When somebody goes to your Website, what they experience there should be reflective of the brand and however that expresses itself in terms of functionality, design, features and all that sort of thing.

I think the social aspect is really an evolution of the brand experience. The big question from a very, very tactical perspective is the level of investment in terms of the technology, in terms of how you want to really enable your site: What’s going to really enhance that experience and furthermore what’s going to ultimately drive the sale?

The priority of a retailer is to focus on enhancing that shopping experience in how it actually influences the purchase. And there might be some community aspects to that. This comes down to really understanding your customers, understanding their shopping behavior, understanding what they want, understanding how they’re currently interacting with your site, understanding where your sales are coming from.

Social Media for Business

The number of marketing professionals world wide now using social media for business purposes has grown in the last 12 months. In a new survey released in August over 86% of marketing professionals from all industries had adopted social media as a marketing and branding tool. Most of the usage of social media is for marketing at 57% with internal communication the next highest at 39%. Using social media as a customer service and support medium has also grown, with 30% of businesses now using it to communicate with their customers.

The other interesting trend that is starting to appear is the placement of staff to handle social media full time within these businesses, with over 57% now committing full time staff to monitor update and service their social media sites.

The top marketing professionals are now either integrating social media within their existing web site or using stand alone sites to maximise the SEO result of a social media strategy. The one area that still lags behind all other forms of advertising is interestingly enough, ROI or return on investment, only 16% of companies had a monitoring and measurement system in place and 4 out of 10 executives did not even know if the tools they were using had an ROI capability.

If your company is looking to integrate a social media strategy into your marketing plans, please let us know, social media is more than a Facebook page and/or a Twitter profile, let us design and manage your social media strategy so that you get the best ROI on your investment.

Mike Andrew is the CEO of Social Media Strategy Company Mike Andrew Consulting.

Facebook Brand Pages Advertising- Which Day Gives you the Best ROI?

I guess some of you may think I sit around all day researching social media trends, well if you do, you’re right.  To really stay on top of all the changes that happen in social media, it really is important that we stay up to date on the ever moving landscape. So here is another little juicy gem for those marketing folks out there looking at using the social media networks as advertising mediums.

It’s important to understand the searching and viewing habits of the audience you’re trying to impact, and social media sites are changing the way we search on line, and as marketers, relying on this information and understanding where and how your audience views or searches for information on social media sites is vital.

So with that in mind, which are the best days to run your adds or banners, and which days generate the best click thru rates for advertisers? Some new research out today sheds some light on this and here are the results for you. Content posted on Facebook based brand pages has a higher than average click thru rate on a Tuesday, the average click thru rate on Tuesday is 9.89%, the highest of any day. Wednesday follows closely behind with click rates of 9.87%.

Friday and Saturday had the lowest click rates with a very measly 2.67% on Friday and 2.7% on Saturdays. If you  take all the days into account, click thrus for Facebook brand pages average 6.76%. This average is lower than Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but still much higher than average CTRs for display advertising across social networks in general, including Facebook itself.

So really what this research means, is that certain days of the week are better for launching a product promotion, and by really understanding how consumers use social media sites, you and your company can start to target where you’ll get the best return on your investment.

In a nut shell, what this all means, is that you really need to have a well thought out communication strategy for updating your Facebook brand page and understand when to create promotions to get optimum response.

Response to your marketing on social media sites is better early in the week then dwindles and picks up again on Sundays.

In my next post, I’ll cover the results of the latest eye tracking study for you, that is a very interesting result. 

About the data:The sample data reported is compiled from nearly 200 million fans impressions on Facebook pages over a five-month period (March – August 2009).

Creating A Blogging Discipline

I thought you may be interested in this article which appeared on our sister site Mike Andrew’s Real Estate Tips & Technology blog.

Here’s an excerpt from the original post:

“Today whilst visiting a real estate office we got talking about social media strategies and why as a real estate office they should be working towards implementing a social media strategy, not just to farm new pastures, but also to help them in the optimisation of their web site. During the conversation we got on the subject of blogging, and why creating a blog would help their Internet marketing efforts.”

To read more of the article please click here