Digital Marketing Blog from Connection Model, a nimble Digital Marketing Agency

Social Media is now Integral to Business Strategy

Written by David Carpenter | September 10, 2012

Most companies now look at social media as a key part of their marketing and overall business strategies, according to new research by Econsultancy and Adobe. 

75% of digital marketers surveyed working for companies with annual revenue of less than $150MM agreed that ‘social media strategy is integral to business strategy’.


73% of small and mid-size company marketers said that social media activity was ‘integral to their marketing mix’.

 

 

Marketers in Larger Companies Agree: Social Media is integral to business strategy

Among larger companies the percentages were still overwhelming; 66% of digital marketers agreed that ‘social media strategy is integral to business strategy’, while 67% said that social media activity was ‘integral to their marketing mix’.

 

What is the Role of  Social Media in your business? 

 

Marketers in small-to-mid-size companies provided these as their top seven responses in the same survey:


  1. Brand / Awareness Channel (59% cited)
  2. Marketing Campaign Channel (44%)
  3. Content Marketing Channel (37%)
  4. Customer Service Channel (24%)
  5. Lead Generation Channel (19%)
  6. Sales Channel (6%)
  7. Retention Channel (5%)

 

What other business areas are impacted by social media activities?


Client-side marketers gave the following as their top seven responses:

 


  1. PR & Communications
  2. Web Analytics
  3. Email Marketing
  4. Customer Service
  5. Search Engine Marketing
  6. Personalization and Targeting
  7. Content Management Systems

 

 

Measuring the Impact of Social Media

 

Marketers were asked a series of questions related to the importance of measuring social media, the relative ease of doing so, and how they self assessed they were doing at this task.

Companies with less than $150MM in revenue responded that they agree with the importance, they find it very difficult, and the majority only aspire to have clear objectives for social media and measure against them:

 

 

 

 

Please read on for more on the Social Media study conducted by Adobe and Econsultancy    

So where does this leave us?

It seems that businesses -- large and small -- overwhelmingly "get it": 

  • Social Media Strategy is vital to Business Strategy. 
  • They "get" that it can play an important role in several important channels of their business
  • They overwhelmingly agree that MEASURING the impact of social media is very important
  • But not many have even created clear objectives, let alone implemented the tools to effectively measure against those objectives. 

TALK BACK

What are your thoughts? What have you found is the greatest stumbling block in effectively goal setting or measuring performance of your social media?
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