Emareketer released this article on the heals of StrongMail’s, (attached to the bottom of this post) findings yesterday. It seams as if companies are ignoring the gut feeling about Social Media paying off, and investing in it anyway, latest studies show that business still don’t feel like Social Media is effective but other studies show that they are still going to invest in it.
When Will Social Media Measurement Mature?
Marketers know that counting fans, “likes” and followers is not the best way to measure success in social media marketing. Yet these metrics are often the top benchmarks for performance. It’s not surprising, then, that marketers consider calculating return on investment to be the biggest challenge of using social media, and that a majority of them believe they cannot measure social media campaigns effectively.
“Marketers often think of social media measurement as listening and monitoring. But that is only one part of a fragmented process, which has contributed to a lack of focus for both marketers and vendors,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report, “Social Media Measurement: Getting to the Metrics that Matter.” “It has also created a culture of data overload, in which metrics that do not have much business value have more importance than those that contribute to the bottom line.”
Research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns.
Social media measurement has evolved significantly in its short history, but the need to prove effectiveness is more important than ever. As top marketing executives plan how much to invest in social media and whether to shift funds from other marketing channels, they need metrics that show not only that their brands have a lot of friends but that those friends actually affect the bottom line.
MarketingSherpa found that measurement effectiveness correlated with experience with social media and how strategic marketers were in their social marketing implementations.
“Marketers must apply business-level analysis to social media measurement to determine its true impact,” said Williamson. “Going beyond brand metrics to understand social media’s effect on a company’s bottom line is critical. And it’s getting easier to consider the relative influence of social media on lead generation and sales.”
Mobile apps and presence on social media sites top investments in the coming year
Social media and mobile are quickly establishing themselves as more than marketing channels simply worthy of a test budget. And, as marketers continue to understand how to leverage both social and mobile to meet their overall marketing objectives, they are looking to better integrate them into their overarching marketing strategy, tying them to other more established digital formats, such as email.
According to StrongMail’s annual marketing trends survey, conducted by Zoomerang, the majority (68%) of business executives worldwide said they plan to integrate their social media marketing efforts with email in 2012. In addition, 44% plan to integrate mobile with their email campaigns. Executives were less likely to focus on integrating more tenured online ad formats, such as search and display, into their email strategy, perhaps indicating such integration consideration and action has already taken place.
Additional data sheds insight on similarities in how valuable each of these channels is to meeting overall objectives. Business executives said email, social media and mobile were all effective marketing channels for building customer loyalty and retention. In fact, 67% of business executives worldwide said email was a valued asset to achieving this goal, with 48% saying the same for social media and 35% for mobile.
Almost half of respondents looked to social media to build customer loyalty, while most executives (64%) said social media was most valuable for awareness-building. Awareness-building was the second most-mentioned value for email (51%) and the third most-mentioned for mobile (28%), slightly behind expanding brand footprint (29%).