Online in Troubled Times

Under pressure to make every marketing dollar count in this recession, marketers are gravitating to channels that offer measurability, accountability and a sound return on investment. And very often, that means heading online, even if they have to shift dollars from offline channels.

There's only one problem. Their consumers are flocking to parts of the Web where the metrics are still pretty shaky and the ROI can be hard to demonstrate — social networks, blogs, word-of-mouth campaigns, video and text-messaging.

What's a marketer to do? For at least some, the answer is to fish where the fish are, budget constraints or not.

According to the 2009 Promo Interactive Marketing Survey of brands and agencies, growing numbers of marketers say they will make use this year of interactive channels that are more likely to have an effect on brand identity than to drive provable incremental sales to the bottom line.

That's notable in this marketing climate, because forecasters have predicted online marketers will pull back from media they deem “experimental” and funnel their scarce resources into tried-and-true online tactics that can be linked, with the proper tracking, to sales increases or other conversions, or at least to hard-edged metrics such as mail opens or clickthroughs.

And in fact, respondents to this year's Promo IM poll said they're holding steady on, or making moderate increases in, their use of those “hard numbers” Internet channels. Just over 74% said they will use e-mail marketing this year, a rate very comparable to reporting in 2008 and 2007. The number of respondents sending out e-mail newsletters is up about seven percentage points from last year, to 70.5%. Users of online display ads have bounced back a bit from the popularity dip they saw last year to almost 41% of those surveyed. And online promotions, search optimization, paid search ads and Web-based contests all remained basically at par with their 2008 levels.

For the big jumps in Internet usage, you have to look at the relative newcomers to this year's IM survey. For example, 38.6% of respondents said they will market online through at least one corporate blog this year, up from only 22.8% who did so in 2007, and up more than 11 percentage points from last year.

Promotions in social networks of any description are also set to pick up steam this year. For the previous two years, fewer than one in five respondents told Promo they would make social nets part of their media mix. This year, more than one-third of those polled said their companies or agencies would use those Web communities in their marketing — an increase of more than 100%.

Apparently, the lack of a clear through-line from winning friends on Facebook to ringing sales at the checkout isn't deterring some marketers from inserting themselves into the social conversation online.

As one respondent said in a write-in comment to this year's survey (an anonymous way some of those polled chose to add texture to their answers): “This is a time for reinvention of brands, both business and personal, and for thinking outside the box.”

And while those new media methods have a long way to go to depose e-mail as the top interactive channel, they're within short hailing distance of some of those other “old school” IM methods. Almost as many respondents said they will operate corporate blogs this year as said they will buy display ads or optimize to turn up in organic searches. And to judge from the 2009 IM survey, viral campaigns and mobile marketing are about as widespread as pay-per-click ads or Web-based contests.

FOR MANY, ROI STILL A MYSTERY

Why this expansion into the social side of the Internet at a time when marketers are supposedly being pressured to lock down budgets and explain every expenditure's contribution to the bottom line? Obviously, the audiences are headed to those parts of the Web; a March Nielsen report found that logging on to social networks is now the number-one online activity, beating out checking e-mail. But that still doesn't mean that marketers, in a supposedly ROI-obsessed age, will spend money to reach them there.

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