Marketers shifting DM budgets to social media

By January 21 2010, 4:46 pm 2 Comments
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Poor old direct marketing it is shaping up to be one of the biggest losers as marketers invest in social media.

Database marketing firm Alterian has a survey out of 1068 marketing professionals worldwide, some key stats:

  1. 66% will be investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months
  2. Of those 40% said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their DM budget to social media activities.
  3. 67% feel social media is either ‘increasingly important’ or ‘critical to success’.
  4. 36% are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools
  5. 42% said they don’t incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and email database
  6. 51% are placing a fair or significant amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric DM model towards multichannel customer engagement
  7. 7% are making no effort at all

David Eldridge, Alterian CEO says if there is one and one thing only to remember it is “investment in social media marketing is futile without adequate measurement. The key to an effective social media strategy is listening”.

No surprise on the DM losing out front, but that said I read also this week that marketers are flooding back to junk mail so I imagine that budget from other areas of marketing might be swapping around as well.

Having spent last year expanding and experimenting this year really everyone is saying measurement measurement measurement (not always three times). Marketers have seen it work anecdotally and seen some figures, but as with direct marketing social media has a strong one to one conversational element at its heart and that lends itself very well to analysis and database crunching.

This clearly chimes with what Twitter itself is planning with the launch of paid for corporate accounts that offer analytics. I’m guessing from what I have heard chatting to agency people and marketers alike that the take-up of these paid accounts could be high (price permitting — really interesting question in its dash for cash: what will it charge?).

Here’s where you get a copy of Alterian’s 7th annual Survey.

 

[Twitter]

  • gotnoteef

    Super – an industry columnist using the ‘junk mail’ term. Nice work.

  • Gavin Wheeler

    Isn’t social media the natural evolution of DM, first we moved 1-2-1 conversations from mail to email and now to social media. Targeting consumers who have indicated an interest in your sector or even better engaged (positively or negatively) with your brand with a relevant message. It’s merely another engagement point to be measured, collected and used to target your messaging. We have been including in our Direct mix for clients for over 2 years now and increasingly delivering better and better results.
    On a personal note I have now bought things on line because I have been targeted on Twitter, freely indicating that I have an interest in a product and then been targeted for that product with a unique offer – sounds like direct at its best to me.
    The key is how to collect and manage all these engagement points and then use them for targeting, hence the data company Alterian putting out this release. Funnily enough they have a product that does just this and ties it into your CRM engine.

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