Marketers are increasingly gearing towards customer acquisition via social media in the year 2013. Octane.in released a report which saw the participation of 500 Indian marketers from 412 companies. According to this report, social media and email marketing gained top positions in the digital spends plan of marketers. About 65% of the respondents, claimed that there would be an increase in their social media spends in the year 2013. Email marketing stood next with 57%. Here is a break-up for your reference.
Brands which have not invested in social media so far are likely to pitch in and those who have are likely to invest more and innovate further. The increased spends will come from spends that were previously being allocated to traditional marketing.
The report also stated that more people are likely to check email messages on mobiles, however, only 40% marketers said that they had a mobile marketing strategy in place. Another finding of the report was that people who received emails went to shops more often than those who received SMSes. This indicates that mobile will certainly support social media. Social media campaigns, applications and commerce can be expected to be made more mobile-friendly to ensure accessibility at all times.
However, even though marketers are increasing their social media spends, the return on investment (ROI) is something to be thought about. Captured below are some key facts stated in Nielsen’s ‘Paid Social Media Advertising Report 2013‘.
- According to advertisers, social media advertising is increasingly been seen as an integrated ‘cross-platform’ tactic and should be used in conjunction with other online and offline media.
- While advertisers prefer to use the same metrics to measure the online and offline marketing effectiveness of their campaigns, very few media sellers can actually provide those metrics.
- ‘Pins’, ‘likes’ and ‘click-throughs’ are often used to measure paid social media advertising ROI, though advertisers and social media agencies think sales generated and brand lift are more appropriate metrics to use to determine ROI.
- The effectiveness of paid social media advertising is under doubt, which means that the growth of this media could be prevented by a lack of relevant and universally employed metrics.
Do you agree with the results of these studies? Do you think that we’ll be seeing increased social media spends in 2013? And will these increased spends benefit businesses despite indefinite ROI tools? Share your thoughts with us.