Blogs

Marketers are spending an average of 12% of their budgets on content marketing, according to results from an Ad Age survey conducted in late 2012 among close to 600 marketers. 1 in 5 respondents said they are dedicating 19% or more of their budgets to content marketing, but a similar proportion are allocating less than 2%. That's despite recent survey results from Econsultancy and Adobe showing that content marketing is the top priority for digital marketers this year. Read more »

Nielsen has released a new report [download page] containing a range of figures related to how US consumers use different forms of media and devices. Among them, a breakdown of the top 8 activities performed on mobiles, by function. The top activity, texting, occupies 14.1% of consumers' mobile time. Coupled with the 5.3% devoted to email and instant messaging, that means that about 1 in every 5 minutes spent on a mobile phone is spent messaging in some form. The next biggest category? Social networking, which occupies 10.2% of mobile time. Read more »

As marketers zero in on mobile and social media for the coming year, it turns out that one may be benefiting the other, according to a new report from Nielsen. In July 2012, Americans spent 32.7 billion more minutes accessing social media sites than in July 2011. More than half of that consumption growth (18.9 billion minutes) was derived from additional time spent visiting social media sites via the mobile web or mobile applications, as consumers devoted 30% of their mobile time to social networks. Read more »

Social media duties are treated more as add-on job functions, and don't often get a dedicated internal team, details a [download page] new Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey. 65% of the survey respondents - the majority of whom hail from organizations that employ more than 100 people - said that social media tasks are assigned on top of current job responsibilities. 27% said they have an internal team that works exclusively on social media, while an additional 5% said they have both an internal department and use an outside agency or partner. Read more »

92% of US online adults say that they read and search for content online, but no single method dominates their content discovery, according to survey findings released November 2012 by nRelate. For example, 31% claim that search engines are not their primary method of finding that content, while 51% read and click on content that is pushed to them through email newsletters from brands they use. 48% report being more likely to click on related content after reading an article, meaning that context looms large in their decisions to read or click through. Read more »

86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing, and the vast majority of those (84%) are leveraging social media (other than blogs), finds a new report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs. That puts social media on par with website articles as the most-used content marketing tactic by B2C marketers. Social gets the nod over articles for effectiveness, though: 57% rate their use of social media as "effective" or "very effective," compared to 53% for website articles. Read more »

In 2013, 47.3% of national brands expect to spend more on local marketing than they did this year, according to [download page] a new study from Balihoo, while an additional 44% plan to spend the same. Just 8.6% plan to cut back on local marketing spend in 2013, slightly less than the 11.1% that plan to cut back on national marketing funds. Read more »

Effective social care (being customer service through social media channels) fosters strong customer loyalty, finds NM Incite [download page] in a new report released October 2012. Among customers who have sought a social care response, 71% of those who experienced a quick and effective response say they are likely to recommend a brand or company, versus just 17% who had an effective but slow response. 33% would recommend a brand or company that offered a quick but ineffective response, and 19% would still recommend a brand or company, even without a social response. Read more »

Marketers are looking more closely at platforms such as mobile, social media, and location-based applications to reach multicultural audiences, and are turning their focus away from websites and online ads, finds the [download page] Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in an October 2012 report. While those latter platforms are still the most used, roughly two-thirds are now using social media (up 8% points from 2010) and mobile marketing (up 5% points), and location-based app adoption has jumped 30% points, from just 2% to 32%. Read more »

Adoption of social customer relationship management (CRM) systems is low among marketers responding to an Awareness survey [download page] released in September 2012, although a significant proportion are planning to use a system by the end of this year. Only 16% of the respondents said they are currently using a social CRM system, but another 21% plan to do so. 17% claim to be unfamiliar with social CRM, while 46% simply do not use a system. Read more »