Thursday 14 March 2013

How companies are allocating their digital marketing budget

Wondering how much budget to allocate for your digital marketing? Gartner, an US based technology research company conducted a research among over 200 marketers from US based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue, across 6 industries to understand how they are allocating their marketing budget and which activities are attributing to their success. Here are the key points from the report:

1. 10.4% of the 2012 revenue was spent on marketing and the budget is slated to increase by 6% in 2013

2. Digital marketing spending average 2.5% of the company's revenue 



Note: Data was gathered from responses to the following question: What percentage of your organization's total marketing expense budget is allocated to digital marketing in 2012?
Source: Gartner (March 2013)

3. Digital advertising accounts for 12.5% of digital marketing budget and 11.6% on content creation and management  

Content creation and management account for the second largest share of the digital marketing budget. As customers use more digital channels for collaboration, research and acquisition of products and services, the enormous pressure to create, manage and distribute content will multiply with time, demanded greater allocation of budget. 

In 2013, top 4 priorities in digital marketing spends will be: e- commerce, social marketing, content and mobile marketing.

4. Surprisingly 41% of the marketers say that savings from digital marketing are reinvested 

Reinvesting savings into digital marketing activities is a smart move and a fairly recent phenomenon. The predominant trend is to use technology only to cut costs. 

5. 50% of digital marketing activities are outsourced 

Digital marketing is a specialized job and marketers are leaning on external teams for support for activities such as search marketing, online advertising, mobile marketing and in many cases even social media marketing. Marketers are realizing that keeping consumers engaged through social channels require constant feeding and nurturing with new content which is both time consuming and as specialized as area as monitoring and analyzing social activities.

6. 70% of the companies have a Chief Marketing Technologist. 80% of them report to marketing. 

Marketing's dependence on technology has created new roles within the organization. Chief Marketing Technologists are familiar with marketing and technology. They have 3 predominant functions:
  • They wear their technology hats to design a uniform customer experience across channels such as social, mobile, commerce and website to attract, acquire and retain customers
  • Integrate data generated externally as well as internally to get a better understanding of their customers
  • Support marketing campaigns and programmes such as a mobile app, paid search marketing and social marketing.  

7. Over 40% say Corporate Website, Digital Advertising and Social Networking is key to their corporate success


Not surprisingly, corporate website and digital advertising both ranked as the top digital activity for marketing's success. Social media emerged as the next most important activity.       

  




Wednesday 13 March 2013

Are you annoying people with your posts?

According to a recently concluded survey by sweatband.com in the UK, people find the following posts most annoying:

1. Bragging fitness addicts and dieters (What would we do without these virtuous posts?!)

2. People who share pictures of every meal they eat. ( I am partially guilty of this myself)

3. Cryptic status writers who posts vague or mysterious updates and when quizzed more about the status,
     usually say they don't want to talk about it! (Everyone likes to seek attention. Some do it through 
     their posts. It's ok) 

4. People who posts updates on everything their child does. (We like what your kids do but perhaps a   
    little less frequency will help)

5. 'Checker inners' who insist on posting every restaurant, cafe, airport, cinema, conference they visit
(Come on, don't be a spoil sport. Half the pleasure of these mundane check ins are to annoy you!!)   

6. Self promoters who see every post as an opportunity to win a customer for their business (You would so understand the need to do so if you were an entrepreneur!) 

Funnily, while more than a 3rd who were interviewed said that they had quit a service because of these annoying posts, plenty of them confessed that they were guilty of putting up these 'irritating' posts themselves.


62 million social media users in Urban India

Business Standard published some interesting stats on India's social media usage. The following points were covered:

  • By December 2012, the number of active social media users in India were 62 million. The number is expected to grow to 66 million by June 2013 
  • College going students and young men form 84% of the social media users base which is about 20.3 million
  • 66% of social media users reside in small town of Urban India. About a quarter of the total user base reside in cities less than 2 lakh population while another 11% are in cities between 2 and 5 lakh population 
  • Social networking often serves as one of the first uses of the internet apart  from the usual such as mails, music and games 
  • As per a survey by IAMAI, 33% of the respondents said that Social Media is their main activity online compared to 32% who voted for mail

With the social media proliferating like wildfire in the smaller cities of India, are marketers taking note?