A new study from ExactTarget has identified the various ways in which consumers and marketers disconnect in terms of their channel preferences and behavior. The study also reveals that consumers and marketers disagree on where companies should invest more of their marketing time and resources to improve customer loyalty. For example, consumers were 27% more likely to say their favorite companies should invest more in email (33% vs. 26%), but 44% less likely to say they want more content about products (14% vs. 25%). Consumers were also far less likely to say they would want their favorite companies to invest more in content about related topics (6% vs. 23%). So for all the buzz about content marketing, it may be an area that inspires more excitement from marketers than consumers.
Similarly, while mobile optimization may be a hot digital topic, marketers were more than 3 times as likely as consumers to say that favorite companies should invest more in smartphone applications (23% vs. 7%).
Interestingly, while marketers were more likely than consumers to want to see more marketing resources allocated to Twitter (12% vs. 5%) and Foursquare (4% vs. 1%), consumers were slightly more favorable to Google+ (4% vs. 3%). There was virtually no difference when it came to Facebook (21% marketers; 22% consumers), one of the few areas of agreement.
Also of note, consumers were 50% more likely than marketers to believe that their favorite companies should invest in in-store help to improve loyalty (12% vs. 8%).
Smartphone-Toting Consumers More Active on Smaller SocNets
In other results from the ExactTarget report, while daily email usage is similar among consumers and marketers, the latter group is far more likely to use the big social media players on a daily basis, but less likely to use smaller players.
That is, compared to smartphone-owning consumers, marketers reported being 18% more likely to use Facebook daily (78% vs. 66%) and 55% more likely to use Twitter daily (48% vs. 31%). But, smartphone-owning consumers were 47% more likely to report daily usage of Pinterest (25% vs. 17%), 38% more likely to use Instagram daily (22% vs. 16%), and 82% more likely to use Foursquare on a daily basis (20% vs. 11%).
About the Data: The ExactTarget was launched in September 2012 to benchmark online behaviors in consumers and marketers. A total of 1,201 consumers and 411 marketers responded to this survey. Consumer responses were weighted by age and gender according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau population estimates and Pew Internet Project’s online activity data to reflect the online US consumer population. Marketer responses were not weighted. Of the 411 marketers, 62 respondents were recruited from Twitter via industry leaders, and 349 respondents were recruited from marketing-specific email lists.
