Reality check for mobile and social media
Published: Mar 26, 2009
Hong Kong - Despite the hype on mobile and social media, marketers in Asia will focus on corporate websites, email campaigns , search engine optimization and behavioural targeting as the key digital marketing strategies in the coming year, according to results from an annual digital survey.
The fifth annual marketing and advertising industry survey conducted by Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA) revealed social network advertising, consumer generated advertising, video sharing, rich media advertising, viral campaigns and corporate or brand blogging are emerging digital strategies that are just beginning to get on marketers' radar.
Digital marketing strategies that are lowest in their priority list are mobile device advertising, widgets and gadgets, podcasting webinars, text message promotions and online games.
David Ketchum (pictured), chairman for the ADMA said, the study gives a reality check between all of the hype about Twitter, mobile applications and other leading-edge techniques.
"But when you look at actual statistics even though budget on digital is increasing, advertisers still primarily use fairly basic online tools," he said.
Despite budgets being slashed in tough times, the survey revealed 58% of marketers expect to spend more in digital this year in direct response to the current global financial crisis with 95% of all respondents allocate budget towards digital marketing.
Small firms with less than 50 employees are more likely to allocate a significantly larger proportion to digital marketing than larger firms.
When it comes to purchasing online ad campaigns, most respondents prefer to use PPC, CPC or CPM. Larger companies and those with larger marketing budgets are significantly more in favour of PPC or CPC while media owners significantly prefer CPM more than agencies and advertisers.
The report also highlighted the use of corporate blogging with 25% of respondents have plans to launch a blog this year that will see agencies and media owners taking the lead.
"Agencies and media companies are racing ahead of their clients with more interesting and effective use of new trends such as blogging or social media," Ketchum added.
"The survey conclusively shows that digital marketing is now mainstream."
While digital is definitely not the largest compared to traditional media ad spend depending on the countries in Asia Pacific ranging from 3% to 20%, media planners and marketers will certainly not consider digital as a new media channel.
Ketchum said the vast majority of marketers and advertisers are active online and the overall sentiment is that digital is a solid, measurable place to invest in troubled economic times.
Among the reasons for marketers hesitant to invest in digital marketing are lack of experience and understanding of the use and benefits of digital marketing and it is not yet part of the companies' corporate culture.
For those who spend less than 10% of their budget online, 26% were not convinced of the benefits of digital marketing and 24% do not find digital marketing suitable to reach its target audience.
The survey was conducted online by Aha! Research with more than 300 marketers and advertisers in Asia, in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association of Singapore, the Vietnam Marketing Association, the Mobile Marketing Association, the Hong Kong Direct Marketing Association and the Hong Kong Institute of Marketing.
How Arrogant is this, that it is a reality check for an industry because marketers say it is low on their list? I think it is time for a reality check for the industry- Three Fourths of all digital messages are sent via a mobile device.
According to TNS Global, 74% of the world’s digital messages were sent through a mobile device in January 2009, a 15% increase over the previous year.
Time to wake up and smell the coffee. Marketers do not set the reality- the market does.
-Kevin Leversee
@ chandler: email me at jeff@webguruasia.com and i'll send you a copy :)
@ adaline: you wrote:
"I’ve recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and have met many who claim they are social media gurus but this area is constantly evolving and marketers who need to be accountable for ROI are all figuring out how to make money from social media as well as come up with a common currency for measurement. It seems social media has its own measurement different from digital."
yes, i certainly agree but there is still no reason why brands shouldn't be jumping in. all they need is the right advice about how to strategise, execute and track/measure. many of the necessary tools already exist to track and many of these tools are either free or available for very low cost.
and i daresay there are those of us in the digital space who already know how to deploy and measure such campaigns. all brands have to do is ask us (er, hire us).
here are a few relevant examples:
1. big timesavers
there are a variety of free syndication tools like ping.fm and hello.txt that allow us to update content in one place and automatically syndicate it across the net in many places such as the brand blog, facebook page, twitter account and so on. also other tools that allow us to upload photos one time into flickr or facebook and automatically get these same posted on the brand blog, brand website or anywhere else we want to stick them.
rss also provides a very powerful platform to track, monitor and respond to what is said about our brand across the internet within a single, easy-to-manage web-based environment that costs nothing. sure, it may take extra resource to handle this but so what? how much extra does this cost (not much), especially when balanced against the benefits that a brand can accrue?
2. automated measurement
automated measurement options abound, starting with google analytics, extending to budurl.com to track clicks from specific twitter (and other) messaging to more options i won't bore your readers with here.
3. fail fast, test faster
because of #1 and #2 above, and even tools like google website optimizer which makes split testing a piece of cake, brands can run tests faster and more efficiently than ever before. who cares if a social media campaign fails in one or more channels? many of these social media campaigns can be run at very low cost anyway. we learn from any mistakes and quickly move on, redeploying the next campaign optimised with learnings from the previous test.
we can even power these tests with the results of insights gained by running periodic online surveys of our target audiences using free and/or inexpensive online survey tools like 4q, survey monkey, survey gizmo and others. these are all quick and easy to deploy.
jeff zweig
chief guru, web guru asia
www.webguruasia.com