On this week's PodCamp Ireland podcast one of the subjects we covered was that of why and how you can track the effectiveness of your social media marketing programme.
I was interested to see that increasingly marketers in Ireland are moving their marketing budgets online with 56% of them committing over 10% of their overall spend to online marketing as reported in the 2008 Irish On Marketing Sentiment Survey conducted by AMAS with members of the Marketing Institute of Ireland.
And the primary reason for this? The ability to measure the effectiveness of online marketing programmes.
The survey was completed online by 268 marketers, 92% of whom were members of the MII during July and August of 2008.
TRENDS IN ONLINE MARKETING IN IRELAND
The survey reports that the most popular online marketing programmes are:
- Email campaigns - implemented by 64% of companies
- Search Engine Optimisation - implemented by 46% of companies
- Banner Advertising - implemented by 41% of companies.
In the area of new media and mobile marketing the formats being explored included:
- Audio and video e.g. podcasts by 15% of respondents
- Blogs and social networking by 20% of the respondents
- Mobile advertising by 10% of the respondents
- Online PR by 28% of the respondents
- Viral marketing by 12% of the respondents (though I am not sure I understand this statistic as viral marketing in itself is not a digital marketing platform).
Some 14% of the marketers surveyed reported that they do no online marketing (this was 30% in 2007).
The respondents also commented that some 47% had moved spend from direct mail to online and 44% had moved from the press to online campaigns.
WHY IRISH MARKETERS ARE MOVING BUDGETS ONLINE
The primary reason for online marketing and digital marketing programmes being used by marketers in Ireland were as follows:
- Optimising reach - 93% of respondents reported this as being very important or important
- Measuring responses - 91% of respondents reported this as being very important or important
- Lower-cost marketing channel - 86% of respondents reported this as being very important or important
- Targeting and segmenting the customer profile - 86% of respondents reported this as being very important or important.
I often get asked by businesses in the SME sector why they need to have a website or online marketing programme. I always reply that online and digital marketing strategies are not just for businesses who want to sell products online. This was borne out by the results of the survey where the Irish marketers surveyed said that only 22% of them implemented online programmes because they saw direct selling online as very important.
I am sure that the adoption of digital marketing strategies will continue to increase due to the lower cost of implementation when budgets are under pressure, increasing adoption of broadband with ComReg reporting that there are over 1 million subscriptions to broadband (approximately 20% being mobile broadband) as at June 2008 and the transparency and ease of tracking.
Though of course this doesn't mean that every digital campaign we implement will be successful. It will however become increasingly a crowded place online and excellence in innovation, creativity, and execution along side integrating online and offline channels will be critical for success when marketing online.
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