There was good news and bad news for social media marketing to be found in the results of the latest CMO Survey from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, which polled 410 marketing executives (most of them vice-presidents or above) from July 16-August 6, 2013. On the positive side, spending on social media marketing is expected to increase substantially in coming years; on the negative side, nobody seems quite sure what they’re achieving with it.
First the good news: CMO survey respondents said they expect social media marketing’s share of overall marketing budgets to increase from an average 6.6% currently to 9.1% over the coming year, and 15.8% over the next five years.
The biggest increases are coming in business-to-consumer products, where social media marketing will grow from a 7.3% share to a 19.5% share over the next five years, and business-to-consumer services (7.7% to 18.6%). Meanwhile social media marketing’s share of B2B product marketing spending is expected to increase from 5% to 13.3% over the next five years, and for B2B services from 7.8% to 15.5%.
Now on to the bad news. First of all, social media marketing is not well-integrated with overall marketing strategies, according to CMO Survey respondents: asked to rank their company’s social media integration on a scale of seven, the average response in the latest survey was 3.9 -- basically unchanged from the average score of 3.8 in the four preceding surveys, going back to February 2011. Integration of customer information actually appears to be getting worse, with marketing execs giving an average score of 3.4 -- down from 3.7 in the August 2012 survey.
The picture for return-on-investment isn’t much better, with 49% of respondents saying they haven’t been able to demonstrate any impact from social media marketing, and 36% saying they have a qualitative sense, but not quantitative. That leaves just 15% who say they have shown the impact quantitatively.
COMMENTARY: Determining return on investment and measurement are still the top issues facing marketers, according to a new report from Forrester titled “Integrate Social Into Your Marketing RaDaR.” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott was blunt summarizing the problem:
“The sobering reality is that nearly a decade into the era of social media, more social marketers are failing than succeeding.”
Ouch -- but sometimes the truth hurts. Here are some of the major findings of the Forrester survey:
- 38% of marketers surveyed identified ROI as one of the top three challenges they face.
- 35% of respondents said they had social media measurement issues.
- 34% of respondents said lack of internal resources was one of their three biggest issues. 25%% of respondents said lack of a social media budget.
- 24% of respondents said “integrating social media channel with other channels.
- 23% of respondents said they lacked time for social media.
According to Elliott, the failure to integrate social media with other channels is due to an attitude he calls “Social Exceptionalism,” which treats social media as fundamentally different from other types of media and marketing:
“Rather than recognizing that social is just another marketing channel, many marketers see it as unique.”
Of course ROI and measurement have been chronic issues for social media marketing. Last year I wrote about a survey of 329 brand marketing executives by PulsePoint and the Economist Intelligence Unit, in which half of the survey respondents said lack of standardized metrics for ROI was a big impediment for social media campaigns.
Also last year, I wrote about “Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data,” a study presented by Columbia University Business School professors and the New York American Marketing Association, which found that most advertisers and marketers are failing to exploit “Big Data,” including the wealth of information about consumer habits and preferences flowing from social media. This survey of 283 corporate marketing decision makers, conducted by Research Now founding the following:
- 39% said their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough.
- 51% said that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI.
- 37% of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization.
- 22% using brand awareness as their sole measure when evaluating their marketing spending.
The fact that measuring the effectiveness and ROI of social media campaigns continues to haunt social media marketers after nearly nine years since Facebook was founded, in spite of the fact that there are so many social media marketers, consultants and wannabe's, books and courses on social media marketing, tells me that there is a sort of mass confusion among these social media marketers. That about a third have ben able to measure their social media marketing ROI tells me that there still may be hope. I remember reading somewhere that marketing was not considered a real science, where there was a definite cause and effect, where you could have predictable and sustainable results. Perhaps social media results are not truly measureable with some accuracy without a huge amount of time and resources, and this could explain why so many simply are not doing it.
Courtesy of an article dated September 12, 2013 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf and The CMO Survey
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