Bristol, England—Social media will be high on most marketers' to-do lists this year, according to a new international study by marketing database company Alterian.
Sixty-six percent of marketing professionals will invest in social channels this year, according to the “Alterian Annual Survey 2009: Are You Ready to Engage?”
Of those investing in social marketing this year, 40% said they'd be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budgets toward social marketing functions. Also, 36% of respondents already have invested in social media monitoring and analysis tools.
However, marketers are still slow to integrate their various channels to optimize lead tracking, Alterian found. About 42% of respondents said they do not incorporate clickstream and Web analytics data into their customer and email databases, causing them to lose “any advantage that this valuable actionable insight could give them,” the company said.
The survey, which received 1,068 responses, was conducted online, as well as at live conferences during October and December.
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college chris
Collegiate Living - Owner
other good news is that social media, if handled correctly, is free!
Jamie Beckland
Emerging Media Manager, White Horse
January 22, 2010 07:03 pm
This is great news, since social channels are proving out as effective lead-gen pools, especially with btob, where consideration cycles are longer, and contact is traditionally more personal anyway (perfect for social media!).
With one recent engagement at White Horse (http://www.whitehorse.com), we were able to deliver higher quality leads for less than 1% of the cost of the client's traditional direct mail programs. We achieved this by using a combination of smart social and digital media strategy, and extensive user-centered design on the landing page and conversion channel to move leads forward.
Glad to hear that most marketers are moving in that direction!
Elyse DeVries
Marketing Specialist - Alterian
January 23, 2010 01:11 pm
It really is an exciting time to be a marketer. Social media is giving us the ability to shift from mass marketing to engaging customers one-on-one in a way that would have been unfathomable 20 years ago.
I think we're now in the phase where marketers have accepted the fact that it's time to work social media into their budgets and they are finally getting internal buy-in. I think the next step is when marketers learn and employ best practices and start to embrace more advanced social media analytics to gauge their success.
Harrison
http://www.capstonebpo.com
January 23, 2010 07:12 am
True, this is the way to go in future. Social Media has its reach across sections and communities and there is no reason why people would leave this effective tool unused.
There are professional firms specializing in Social Media management and they provide what is most required i.e. reach.
Just one thing seems to be marked out in clear terms though. This is the well laid out spending plan via the internet.Many times people come across messages,mails which they call SPAM and there are going to be some in the market who would invariably resort to this old fashioned useless technique.
People have to be decisive on dealing with this.
