Marketing Officers Grow Online Spend to Boost Efficiency

Following our recent post ‘Fannie Mae Get Help, But Will the Crunch Affect Online’, it seems marketing folk are making the shift to online in readiness for what may be a more difficult year ahead.

The NMA article was sponsored by Rackspace, who had surveyed a number of marketing decision makers. Whilst the minority of decision makers (35%) believed that online was the most transparent form of advertising for results, interestingly, 61% of those questioned said they would spend in excess of 50% of next year’s budget online.

The article also revealed that 92% thought social networking was a waste of time.

That’s an interesting point and one we’ve encountered with senior marketing people historically. Because there’s such a buzz about social networking, there’s a tendency for people to embark on social marketing projects only to find the end result wasn’t quite as expected. You only need to look at the graveyard of corporate facebook pages to see evidence of this.

To harness the true potential of the online community, it’s important to have engaging, compelling content. Something that grips the imagination of people, and gives them a genuine reason to share with their own online community, has a chance of overcoming the hurdle of becoming another piece of social-graveyard content.

So shifting budget to Online seems to be the order of the day but there appears to be some reticence when it comes to social media - understandable if the experience has been bad.

We'd urge marketers to think again however. Properly managed social campaigns can see in excess of 100,000+ visits a week, provided the content is right and is syndicated with the online community in the most effective way.