There's a bewildering array of interactive channels out there, and more seem to pop up on the trending radar every month, if not every week. They don't always get a full share of respect when they first show up; you could fill a very hefty book with the ink spilled by pundits and experts questioning the worth of real-time short message platform Twitter. And yet at press time the service is celebrating its fifth anniversary and handles some 140 million tweets a day and one billion each week — including a substantial number from marketers looking to reach the people plugged into the medium.
Granted, the metrics for success in these new marketing channels are still evolving and in some cases remain downright unformed. The old question of the lifetime value of a Facebook “like” still hangs in the air. But measurements come with maturity, and the phenomenal growth of platforms like Twitter — which only a year ago averaged 50 million tweets a day, almost a third of the current level — has persuaded a good number of marketers that they can't wait for metrics to form. ROI can come later; they appear to want to start experimenting with new platforms now.
For this year's Chief Marketer Interactive Marketing Survey, we asked about the level of marketers' involvement with the standard 10 digital channels we've checked on in the past. Takeup for those leading media tracks very closely with what we've seen in the last two annual surveys, with the largest number of respondents saying they use email marketing (73.8%) and email newsletters (65.5%) to reach customers and prospects online, followed by off-site social networks, SEO, Twitter, online display ads, and so on.
Interestingly, the biggest increase among this group of leading media occurs in the use of social networks like Facebook and in Twitter. The proportion of marketers who said their brands now market through social networks (65%) is very nearly the same as those who use email newsletters. And Twitter use increased almost 10 percentage points, to 48.3%, overtaking online display ads and very nearly equaling last year's finding for marketers' use of search optimization — a tactic that was in full maturity years before Twitter was born in 2006.
And use of display ads within social media such as Facebook grew to 29.8% from 22.4% last year. That was enough to bring social media ads into the Top 10 tactics and dislodge webinars, whose use fell slightly to 24.6% of respondents from 27.7% last year.
A Deeper Look
For this year's survey, Chief Marketer felt obliged to go beyond these primary tactics and ask about the marketing industry's adoption of the newer, more cutting-edge interactive tools, from location-based check-in services to social coupons á la Groupon. Space doesn't permit listing those complete findings here (a fuller discussion of the results is on our Research Site/), but many of these tactics are seeing a healthy takeup rate despite their relative immaturity.
For example, while 20.1% of those polled said they run online contests to generate leads and web traffic, 15.4% drive store traffic with printable web coupons, although only 8.7% deliver those coupons to mobile phones. And 13.1% of marketers said they run campaigns in check-in services — just barely behind the 13.6% who said they run text message campaigns. And while 16.5% of respondents said they run ads in online video, only 9.3% said they create and post online video for their brands. Still, that's more than the 8.1% who have tried social coupons or the 7% who have put their brands into online games.
Asked to list channels they used other than the 30 tabbed on the survey, survey respondents cast write-in votes for digital tactics ranging from personalized microsites built on PURLs to product-demo videos and real-time streaming online broadcasts. Clearly, marketers are in a mood to reach customers wherever they can find them, as long as the cost barriers are low enough.
“Am not doing anything but need to do almost all,” was the plaintive response from one marketer clearly put off by his company's lack of an interactive strategy.
Proxy Metrics Continue
Budget realties can't be ignored, and marketers mostly allocated their 2010 spending the same way they did in 2009. Once again, asked to name the three media in which they spent the most money last year, respondents most often cited email (43.3%) and email newsletters (27.3%), followed by display ads (23.8%), paid search (23.7%) and SEO (22.1%). However, the survey registered a large increase in the number of responses naming campaigns run in social media; 20.7% of those polled named this as a top marketing expense last year, compared to 12.7% who said the same in the previous survey.
But return on investment is undoubtedly hard to demonstrate in many forms of interactive marketing, and that's probably why marketers placed ROI sixth on their list of key performance metrics for digital campaigns. Just under a third of respondents — 31.9% — said they look to ROI to gauge the success of a digital campaign. As in past years, most pointed instead to hard-edged but more indirect measurements such as clickthroughs, overall traffic to their websites, leads generated and page views as their primary benchmarks for determining an effective campaign. Incremental sales are key but are often hard to attribute, making them only slightly more useful than ROI.
Perhaps as an effect of the growing acknowledgment that interactive marketing's bottom-line value is hard to quantify, the share of respondents claiming that online campaigns are more profitable than offline actually dropped nine percentage points in this year's survey, down to 25.7% from 34.9% last time. And while those claiming online tactics were less profitable or equal to offline efforts edged up slightly, the largest increase — almost four percentage points — was among those who admit that they simply do not know if interactive marketing turns more profit than other methods.
Facebook Rules, Twitter Grows
In terms of venues for social media campaigns, it couldn't be clearer: Facebook (39.3%) and LinkedIn (29.9%) are the channels of choice, with other social networks such as MySpace barely registering. While location-based networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt garner a lot of press attention, they have yet to make their presence felt among survey respondents.
As one would expect, the number of respondents who said their companies plan to get active in social media is much lower than last year: 8.5% of respondents said they will launch their brands' first social presence this year, compared to 17.7% who said the same in the previous study. Holdouts from social media remain about flat at 6.1%.
Smartphone campaigns — either as apps or as display ads — show an interesting dynamic. While 15.9% of marketers surveyed said their brands ran mobile campaigns aimed at smartphone users last year and will do so again this year (just over the 11.5% who said the same in last year's survey), only 19.8% said they will run their first smartphone campaigns this year, compared to 28.6% who made that prediction last time. This might suggest that marketers who have not yet moved into the mobile smartphone channel are increasingly those who don't see a value in it. Or they may be putting their efforts into mobile optimization rather than apps.
Meanwhile, the number who did not target smartphones last year and will not this year remains fairly constant at about 50% of all survey respondents.
All those findings throw the results for Twitter marketing into high relief. Last year's survey saw a large jump in the number of marketers who had used Twitter in the previous year and planned to use it again, to 39.1% from 10.1% in the first interactive marketing survey. This year just over half of respondents said they ran campaigns on Twitter last year and will do so again in 2011. First-time entries to the microblogging channel are down slightly this time, to 10.6% — again suggesting that marketers who can find value in the real-time service have mostly already done so. And confirmed Twitter avoiders are also down, to 18.9% from 26.6% last year.
Marketers don't operate in a sealed bubble, and a higher than average use of interactive tools in their personal lives may underlie this trend to digital experimentation at their jobs. For example, in the last six months, 75% reported that they have uploaded content to a website, and 64.8% have rated or reviewed a product or service online. Almost 45% said they checked into a location via mobile phone in that time, while 36.8% said they have scanned a 2D barcode to get content or offers.
METHODOLOGY:
The 2011 Chief Marketer Interactive Marketing Survey was conducted online between February 9 and March 20, 2011, and polled 647 active marketing professionals distributed across both business-to-consumer and business-to-business models from brands and agencies working in the manufacturing, retail, financial, healthcare, travel, entertainment, advertising, publishing, database and nonprofit sectors.
Download the full Interactive Marketing research report here
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