Face It, Marketers Just Aren’t Into Podcasts and RSS

Don’t bet the farm just yet on RSS, podcasts and other so-called Web 2.0 media.

Marketers are interested in them, but not as much as they are in old-fashioned things like word-of-mouth.

Those are among the findings of a new survey by Epsilon.

A poll of 175 marketers in the U.S. shows that roughly half are either very or somewhat interested in mobile devices.

But that’s dwarfed by word-of-mouth, which draws the interest of 81% of all respondents. Product placement is next at 59%.

Mobile is followed by podcasting, in which 41% are interested. Further down are blogs at 37%.

And RSS? It attracts the interest of 32%. And instant messaging is last on the list—at 30%.

“We’re in the very early stage of leveraging those technologies,” says Al DiGuido, president of Epsilon Interactive. “There’s not enough folks using them effectively yet for them to be significant on the radar screen.”

He adds: “They still haven’t gotten critical mass from an advertising perspective. You’ve got people sitting at desks with a laptop or computer in front of them, and that’s their primary conduit to the information and transactions, especially in the B-to-B world.”

But that lack of interest does not extend to new media in general. Of the firms surveyed, 79% are cutting their budgets in favor of trackable media like direct mail, e-mail and search.

“Companies are looking at the relationship between dollars being spent and the return on investment,” DiGuido explains. And this leads many marketers to interactive channels in which ROI is easily tracked, he added.

On average, the respondents spend 66% of their total marketing budgets on traditional media like magazines, television and radio and the remaining 34% on interactive media.

Interactive budgets are broken down as follows:

*Internet display ads—32%

*E-mail—24%

*Affiliate marketing—16%

*Search—15%

*Other interactive channels—13%

The survey also shows that marketers rely on data and modeling tools when determining target markets for each channel. Forty percent use existing customer data and preferences, and 31% rely on sophisticated modeling and planning. In this area, only 18% make rough estimates based on experience.

This has serious meaning for e-mail newsletter publishers, according to DiGuido.

“It’s all about relevance,” he says.

He adds that many companies start with a “basic vanilla newsletter,” then move on to more dynamic editions based on the reader’s clickpath.

This process isn’t manual—it can be done through “business rules and technology,” DiGuido continues. “You go into a content database and build a newsletter tagged with content relevant to the user, and it can be done in real time.”

DiGuido sees “nothing super disappointing” in the survey results. But he observed that “sometimes marketers want to have the path of least resistance.”

This may be seen in the finding that 46% of the firms surveyed make rough estimates based on experience when allocating money across channels for specific marketing efforts. Only 23% rely on sophisticated modeling and planning. Another 19% say they have a certain amount allocated, and 11% indicate their agency develops a media plan.

Meanwhile, almost all the respondents said their CRM could be better. And almost 40% do not believe they have easy access to data.

But they are planning to address those failings by investing in their data systems. Of those surveyed, 27% plan to start data mining within the next year. In addition, 26% will use campaign management and workflow tools, 24% will invest in marketing automation tools and 22% will turn to Web analytics.

“It all starts with the marketing database,” DiGuido says. “Some folks have archaic databases. They kept data in silos. They don’t have a 360 view of the way in which their customers interact with channels.”

Epsilon conducted the survey with GfK NOP.