Marketing Survey Finds Positive Outlook
StrongMail, a provider of marketing solutions for e-mail marketing and social media, released the results of its “2011 Marketing Trends” survey (download PDF), which provides insight into how businesses plan to budget and prioritize marketing dollars in the new year. Conducted in November, the global survey received responses from 925 business leaders.
According to the survey, half of the businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011 and another 43 percent plan to maintain current levels. Only 7 percent of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, a significant improvement over the 11 percent reported in last year's survey.
E-mail marketing (65 percent) and social media (57 percent) will be the top areas of investment in 2011, followed by search advertising (41 percent). Direct Mail (36 percent) and trade shows/events (33 percent) are the top targets for decreased spend; however, this is a marked improvement over last year’s survey, which found marketers reducing spend in these areas by 42 percent and 44 percent respectively.
The most important e-mail marketing initiatives for 2011 are increasing subscriber engagement (52 percent), improving segmentation and targeting (49 percent), and integrating social media and e-mail marketing (43 percent). On the latter point, a full 71 percent have already integrated e-mail and social, or plan to 2011.
Among social media initiatives, Facebook is the biggest priority (35 percent), followed by viral/referral marketing programs (22 percent). Marketing via Twitter and implementing social media management technology tied for third place (21 percent). Awareness building (63 percent) is the primary goal for social media marketing initiatives, followed by loyalty acquisition (54 percent) and reaching new audiences (42 percent). As is the case with any new channel, social media marketing is seen as least effective at generating leads and revenue.