Mobile marketing continues its rapid ascent, but social media marketing
needs help
Marketing Innovation Summit, Boston, May 2, 2011 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today
announced results from its global survey of marketers, titled “The State of
Marketing 2011.” The sample covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers
across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes.
Results revealed a number of key findings, including the urgent need to turn
data into action, the increasing recognition of mobile’s marketing power,
social media marketing growing pains, and a desire for more integrated
technology solutions.
. Small, but Growing Use of Mobile: More than 40% currently use mobile
marketing tactics and another 20% plan to do so within the year, as more
consumers rapidly adopt connected mobile devices.
. Social Media Expectations: More than half of marketers use social
media, but based on responses, their enthusiasm is tempered, suggesting that
the peak of inflated expectations has passed; marketers are focused on
finding the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights
and actions.
. Marketers Ready to Bridge the ‘Analysis to Action’ Gap: Nearly 60%
of respondents listed “measurement, analysis and learning” as their top IT
bottleneck, whereas last year, they overwhelmingly viewed “IT support of
marketing needs” at the top. More than 60% identified “turning data into
action” as their top organizational issue.
. Integrated Marketing Suite Required: Nearly 90% of respondents
expressed interest in an integrated marketing suite, as marketing’s need for
technology grows and technology adoption matures. More than half of
marketers cited technology as the key to productivity, in particular, to
resolving the challenges of meaningful measurement and analysis, and to
choosing the next best course of action.
. Marketing Silos Limit Integrated Cross-Channel Marketing: Marketers
believe in the concept of Interactive Marketing, but have more progress to
make toward this vision. While responses suggest that interest in achieving
truly integrated cross-channel dialogs with customers is high, nearly half
of survey participants report that they are only partially achieving
that goal. The key barrier is organizational structure and internal
processes. Regardless, 57% report the adoption of inbound marketing methods
(personalized targeting/messaging) in their web channels.
. Understanding Marketing Attribution Still the Holy Grail: Marketers
are getting more serious about using cross-channel attribution to understand
marketing effectiveness. In the ranking of top marketing issues,
“attributing success to marketing” took the second spot. Those marketers
who adopt an Interactive Marketing strategy will already have a centralized
view of marketing touches, i.e. a centralized interaction history of
marketing contacts and customer responses.
“‘More’ is certainly the key word for our times. But as the results of our
annual survey of marketers reveal, the proliferation of marketing channels
and the simultaneous explosion of data pose a wealth of challenges for
marketers in 2011,” said Paul McNulty, EMM Marketing, IBM. “Marketers are
looking for ways to turn more marketing possibilities into better marketing
results.”
To view the complete survey results, please visit
http://www.theinteractivemarketingjourney.com/.
