Interactive Goes Big

In 2009 the Chief Marketer Interactive Survey showed marketers deciding to follow online audiences into social networks, where the branding effects were strong but the return on investment sketchy.

Never mind the ROI. If last year's respondents were baiting a hook to “fish where the fish are,” in 2010 they're chartering party boats and using long-line nets. The current survey shows a strong increase in marketer involvement with social networks, smartphone apps and the round-the-clock updates of Twitter.

As it did last year, e-mail messaging and newsletters lead the roster of interactive marketing channels employed by respondents to the 2010 survey. But this year social networks come on strong, with 58.3% saying they market through off-site communities such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. While results can't be reliably tracked with 2009 because of changes in our survey format, this social marketing contingent undoubtedly represents a large increase over the 34.3% of last year's response group that said they were promoting their brands in social nets.

And that doesn't take into account the percentage (24%) who are marketing through social communities built on their own sites — not large enough to make it into the top-10 interactive channels for 2010, but still considerable. And the two social-marketing response groups together seem to make it official: Brands are listening to their customers and encouraging their fans to speak their piece.

Beyond the Profile Page

Marketers this year showed strong interest in putting their campaigns into the social sphere in various ways. For example, while 44.9% of marketers said they use display ads on the Web, about half that number (22.4%) said they run such ads in social-network pages. And almost as many (21.6%) reported that their departments regularly reach out to bloggers to further their campaigns. Only 10.8% said they have built applications or widgets for social networks, however.

Other interactive channels that came in below the top 10 mark in this year's poll include viral campaigns (26.3%), text messaging (14.4%), online coupons (13.2%), corporate blogs (6.7%) and mobile coupons (6.6%).

Low cost may be one factor leading so many marketers into social media — or at least one benefit of such programs. Asked to select the three channels that accounted for most of their budget last year, half of respondents (50.2%) cited e-mail messaging campaigns, and two out of five pointed to e-mail newsletters. Paid search, search engine optimization and Web display ads were all named by about a quarter of respondents. By comparison, only 12.7% said off-site social media marketing was among their top-three expenditures last year.

But social media is also valued for the way it serves the strategic aims that marketers most commonly want to accomplish through interactive marketing: predominantly, to build their brands (72.4% of all respondents) and shore up loyalty among their customers (62.6%). Asked to name the three main goals for their interactive campaigns, marketers cited both of those purposes somewhat more frequently than driving traffic to a Web site (60.3%), generating direct sales (59.5%), gathering leads (57.8%), or getting consumers to opt in to e-mail (54.3%).

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