Seventy-eight percent of marketers view social media marketing as a way to gain a competitive edge, but only 7.7 percent of online marketing spend goes towards social media according to Coremetrics survey “Face of the New Marketer.”
Even with an interest in social media, 33 percent of spend, on average is devoted to online advertising and 28 percent to online promotion design and implementation. Fifty-eight percent of respondents have added user-generated content or reviews in the past year. Thirty-one percent have implemented a blog and 25 percent have added an RSS feed over the past year.
The findings indicated that most marketers have plans to add a social media marketing program at some point. Fifty percent said they would implement user-generated content and 22 percent plan to implement a blog. Twenty percent say they will implement social networks and another 20 percent plan to do the same with a RSS feed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was the top priority, but ranked fourth in terms of time and budget allocation. Twenty-two percent of a marketers time was focused on email campaigns, while the biggest portions of budgets (33%) go to online advertising.
“This study echoes many of the qualitative findings that we hear from our customers on a day to day basis-marketers are aware of the impact that social media marketing can have on their overall program, but view it as uncharted territory, not worthy of their budget,” said John Squire, SVP product strategy, GM marketing services at Coremetrics.
