Last month, we saw a couple of interesting surveys released that help paint a picture of what 2010 will look like for marketers. First, consider the results of this report by Nielsen, which shows consumers moving online in droves to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
For example, in December of 2009, consumers worldwide spent an average of over 5 1/2 hours on social networking sites, up 82% from an average of 3 hours in December of 2008.
Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in 2009, growing from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. However, despite Twitter’s amazing growth spurt last year, the more accessible Facebook is still the most popular social networking destination.
These statistics show that more and more, social networking sites are becoming online homes for consumers. Plus, with more and more people connecting to the mobile internet, consumers are increasingly able to take their online homes with them into the real world. The bottom line is that your company needs to be online too, interacting with your customers where they live.
Statistics like these make it hard to brush off social media as “just another trend,” and in 2010 marketers will be spending an increasing amount of time and energy connecting to consumers via social media. For example, according to a study released in January by Alterian, 66% of marketers plan to increase spending on social media marketing efforts this year.
Where will the additional money come from? 40% of marketers who planned to increase spending on social media in 2010 planned to pay for it by shifting at least 1/5 of their direct marketing budgets toward social media.
In an article on DMNews, Bob Barker (VP of corporate marketing at Alterian, not the former game show host), said that the results of the survey indicated “an increasing professionalism in marketing. We are getting to the phase of ‘yes, we can’ in social marketing. We can listen to customers on social media and engage with them in an interesting way on social media.”
None of this means that direct marketing is becoming irrelevant, however. For example, as we noted last week, direct mail can still be extremely effective, and companies that have discontinued direct mail campaigns completely have noticed their sales suffering as a result.
The key to successful marketing in 2010 is to integrate direct marketing, mobile marketing and social media to reach out to customers both in the physical world and in the virtual worlds where they increasingly spend their free time.
Dukky makes it easy to incorporate social and mobile media into direct response campaigns. With our platform, customers can share your offer via email, mobile and social media networks, so that when you reach out to one customer, you could potentially be reaching hundreds.
Plus, we’ll hook you up with what Alterian says almost 2/3 of marketers are still missing-analytics. Find out how your campaigns are performing in real-time, and see who your most influential customers are.
See how we can increase your response rates by 8 times more than traditional marketing.
Tags: social media
[...] results of the survey should surprise no one-in fact, they closely mirror the results of a survey released last month by Alterian. Marketers know that they need to be involved in social media. [...]