This weekend I have received a number of email and seen many tweets about the growth in social media predicted by Forrester and covered by Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/04/forrester-social-media-growth.html
In the Forrester chart there are some interesting predictions.
Tactic CAGR Growth
Social Media 34%
Mobile Advertising 27%
Display Advertising 17%
Search Marketing 15%
Email Marketing 11%
While it is great to see all of these marketing techniques are predicted t go up I think there is a fundamental problem we need to address:
Marketing Mix Allocation – what part of the mix will be cannibalized by this increase in spend in these digital tactics? The biggest barriers to increased shifts in precious marketing dollars to digital marketing is the media mix. Many marketers are terrified of making this shift without any guarantee that the exact numbers of leads or eyeballs will be made up in the new tactic.
Tactic Integration – and how we might get them to work collaboratively. These all have the ability to be ran with a moderate degree of success as independent tactics but the real value will be achieved when they are all integrated and treated as a relay race by linking of the hand offs to one another.
Resources – with the exception of Display Advertising, all of these other tactics require more labor than traditional online and offline advertising tactics. Where will these people come from? How much of this will be eaten up by agency fees? This will be the challenge to marketing organizations moving forward.
What can we do to help achieve these numbers?
Education – we need to start now educating everyone in the marketing chain on the value of these tactics. We need to education them that they can’t and should not be measured under traditional metrics of sales and awareness but within their own set of metrics based on the desired actions.
Metrics – we need to establish precise metrics for each activity. If we are going to leverage Facebook then we need to establish specific goal for that activity – how many followers or a specific number of comments or uploaded should be the metrics.
Integration – start thinking of the logical hand offs and start making then integration and connects necessary in the organization. For social media start to understand how we can reach the influencers now via our press outreach. Leverage search rankings to understand the authority of those sites in the top listings. Document the hand offs between the tactics and use that as another proxy for success – how we can integrate them.