Online social marketing is growing but budgets aren’t, Jupiter study finds
Online social marketing is growing, but the budgets supporting it aren’t, says a new report from JuptierResearch. Most social marketers surveyed don’t plan major budget increases in the near future and several of the largest spenders on such tactics last year say they’ll scale back this year, according to Jupiter’s report “Social marketing scorecard: Benchmarking social marketing initiatives.”
Marketers may be reluctant to spend big until they find more accurate ways of measuring success, the research firm speculates. While many social marketers say they run such campaigns for brand awareness, only 12% use brand survey metrics and only 8% track results via a professional buzz monitoring service, according to Jupiter. A larger number actually measure social marketing campaigns using traditional metrics of direct response, such as clicks, cited by 54%; and sales, cited by 51%.
“Social marketers are challenged by campaign measurement. A key problem stems from the misalignment of goals and measurement metrics,” says Jupiter`s report. Jupiter also notes that relatively small budgets for social marketing tactics aren’t out of line with the low cost of producing some social marketing campaigns such as blogs and podcasts.
Though budgets for social marketing tactics are limited, Jupiter’s data indicate that their use will continue to grow among marketers. According to the report, while 4% of marketers who’d tried social marketing previously say they will cease such tactics this year, 42% of marketers surveyed who say they will engage in social marketing in 2007 are new to the field this year.
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