Essential Social Stats & Facts That Brand Marketers Should Consider

From Simpy Zesty
Social MediaOctober 22, 2012No Comments

If there’s one thing that marketers are constantly craving for, it’s new stats and facts to sink their teeth into. Knowledge is indeed power and with new developments, research and products happening regularly  it can be difficult to keep up with them. One good place to keep up with this is at the major conferences and events held around the world, where agencies, brands and companies will always provide stats and figures. The Dublin Web Summit last week was no exception so here are the major points to take away from the digital marketing stage, with key facts presented as images. 

Mark Dewings – Brand Communications At Soundcloud

Talking about the importance of sound and how its under-utilised as a medium, Dewings mentioned that there is a discrepancy between how we consume and create mediums. While creating images was popular thanks to the popularity of Instagram and Camera+, others like sound and video recording was much lower, sharing similar levels of creation and consumption

His main reasons for embracing sound were that it’s everywhere, it’s inherently practical as it requires less digital memory, it’s less intrusive in comparison to other mediums as it requires less effort to process as video requires more than one sense.

Alan Coleman – Founder & CEO of Wolfgang Digital

On a talk about at the three most important innovations for marketing – retargeting (promoting what the user already likes), analytics (finding out how many times people visit your site before a sale is made) and interest (developing interest in consumers through advanced ad targeting) – Coleman spoke about the wealth of options that brands have to help amplify their marketing efforts.

One of which looking at the process between first visiting a site and purchasing a good or product. Using some of the status gathered from Wolfgang Digital’s work, Coleman showed how you could get specific details to help your retargeting campaign such as average site visits per purchase and the number of different sites visited per purchase.

Jan Rezab – Founder Of SocialBakers

Considering that stats are SocialBaker’s bread and butter, Jan Rezab based his talk on understanding fans and the importance of engagement and consumer feedback. Elaborating on Socialbakers’ ‘Socially Devoted’ concept that it introduced at Le Web London, Rezab showed that while more brands were beginning to respond to consumer queries, they were still a long way from achieving satisfactory levels (less than 50% of questions on social media were responded to). However, in comparison to 2011 where only 5% of questions were answered, it’s has improved immensely

Hubert Grealish – Global Head of Brand Communications At Diageo

Talking about how the relationship between brands and customers has reversed, Grealish talked about how consumers want a greater input into how brands work and the power of getting them involved. Mentioning that 2/3 of people are influenced by personal recommendations, he revealed that in a recent survey, 55% wanted to have ongoing conversations with brands and 89% would feel more loyal if they were invited to take part in a group.

What was particularly interesting was that out of the 89%, 41% wanted companies to seek feedback from them and 37% said that they would like newer ways to interact with brands via social media.

Dharmesh Shah – Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot

Concentrating on how Google’s search engine works, Dharmesh Shah talked about how PPC ads aren’t as good an investment as you think saying “you’re not buying attention, you’re renting it.” Instead, what you should focus on is creating useful content, clean design and fast websites as that’s what Google is actually looking for.

What you want to focus on is results and not rankings, as measuring how many leads you get for your site is more important. He also stressed the importance of Google+, saying that the important part is the part before the ‘+’ and how it’s playing a major part for writers and journalists, highlighting their Google+ profile, the number of circles they’re in and allowing you to see articles they’ve written.

Omid Ashtari – Director Of Business Development At Foursquare

Although the major status Ashtari provided aren’t anything new, they’re still significant enough to be repeated again. With over 25 million users globally and one million businesses registered, the service has registered over 2.5 billion check-ins at 40 million venues.

However, Ashtari’s talk focused on case studies where Foursquare was used in an innovative manner such as the London 2012 olympics where Foursquare became an unofficial events guide, showing visitors where to visit, where all the events were being held and ran badge competitions to encourage checkins. Another example was the weather channel where your first check-in of the day triggered a weather report filled with images and global news.

Mobile – It’s 1999 All Over Again

Our very own Niall Harbison decided to speak about mobile for his presentation. He showed how the transition from desktop and personal computers to mobile devices is having an effect on the biggest companies like Google and Facebook as well as hurting traditional media companies.

It is no longer good enough just to have a mobile version of your website and big companies like Nokia and Blackberry have been caught out and will probably die because of the emergence of iOS and Android. The companies and brands who are going to win big are those who bet big on mobile and who start embracing while others are still asleep.

Simply Zesty

http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/essential-stats-facts-that-brand-marketers-should-consider/

USER EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW 30-SECOND SPOT

Excerpt from AdAge Digital article. By: Matthew Creamer Published: October 08, 2012

User-experience design is too often thought of as a digital-marketing task, ensuring that website and app development meet and ideally exceed usability standards. It needs to be something bigger -- much bigger -- if the ad business wants to remain relevant. Agencies and marketers should think about how the tenets of improving user interaction and user experience can be applied throughout the brand experience, from importation of digital assets and in-store browsing use of call centers. The idea is to get beyond ad-centric ideas that inevitably get lost in the muck of media fragmentation and message overload and to offer brands more ways to reduce friction with their consumers.

 

The proliferation of digital interfaces when we interact with brands offers a perfect metaphor for how the industry should be thinking about brands. Agencies of all stripes need to think about how they can integrate big-thinking experience designers into their creative and strategy offerings. Inspirations include startups such as Uber, whose brilliantly designed mobile app and fleet of friendly drivers, is taking the pain out of ordering and paying for car service in urban environments. Larger enterprises are getting it, too. Consider British Airways, which has simplified its consumer-database approach in a way that makes it easier for the airline to personalize the flight experience, or Apple and its seamless web-to-store commerce experience.

"We have to consider the roles our brands take in consumers' lives in every capacity, not just the fleeting interactions traditionally considered," said Mathew Ray, senior VP-director of creative technology at Mullen, whose clients include JetBlue, Zappos and Google. Mullen's Experience Design practice uses nontraditional, interdisciplinary teams whose shape depend on the brand in question. "This hyper-bundled approach helps us disseminate experience design and other thinking throughout all kinds of projects."

TO DO: Hyper-bundle. Think broadly about user experience and designing all consumer interactions as a user-experience expert would. Speaking of user-experience experts, hire some. And don't be afraid. People will tell you're treading on turf better left to IDEO, that you just make ads, not experiences. People can be stupid.

Hispanics and Smart Phone usage. DraftFCB

Adobe takes the wraps off new website developer tools

Adobe has taken the wraps of a new set of tools and services designed to help developers create content using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

The software vendor launched its new Edge Tools and Services products at an event in San Francisco yesterday, and announced the immediate availability of Adobe Edge Animate 1.0, Adobe Edge Inspect 1.0, Adobe PhoneGap Build 1.0 and Adobe Edge Web Fonts.

The company also confirmed that Edge Animate, which will allow developers to create animated content for web sites using HTML, JavaScript and CSS, will be given away for free to encourage adoption by web designers.

The products will also be made available to users of Adobe’s Creative Cloud service.

“We are excited to put a powerful new set of HTML5 tools into the hands of Web designers and developers and can’t wait to experience the beautiful websites, digital content and mobile apps they’ll create,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of interactive development at Adobe.

“[This] is why we’re contributing to the web platform and making the Edge Tools and Services available for free, including the first release of Edge Animate.”

5 Distribution Channels for Serious Content Creators

The “old” days of the Internet were quite simple for publishers. Build a website and allow users to visit it when they were interested in consuming that specific content. Today though, users have more options than ever for where, when and how they consume content. For publishers, this means creating a brand presence across platforms while at the same time distributing and defining content in new and creative ways.

1. News curation apps
Apps such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo!, Float and many others in the news curation app space recognize that users desire content from a variety of sources and will therefore be inclined to initiate their news consumption experience with a news curation app rather than with a specific media site or app in mind.
This isn’t so much a new trend as it’s an evolution of the news consumption experience that users have been familiar and comfortable with from portals to RSS readers. As usage of tablets and mobile devices increase, this will only advance the growth and engagement with news curation apps.

A recent survey by Pew Research Center shows that 53% of tablet owners get news on their device every day. Beyond the tablet app space, Facebook has begun experimenting with news curation on its social network, for example, by working with brands such as The Washington Post on development of Washington Post Social Reader. Additionally, these providers recognize that publishers need to be compensated for their content and many are now introducing revenue sharing. While there are many nascent business models for these apps, providers and those publishers experimenting with them will be better positioned in the long-run for addressing users’ interests than those publishers who continue to sit on the sidelines.

2. Social news streams
One of the early challenges for social media enthusiasts within news organizations was convincing upper management or traditionalists to create a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Fortunately, that battle is mostly over.

However, as these social media enthusiasts have become social media editors, the latest challenge is figuring out how to best manage a media presence on these social networks. The time of day and frequency with which you post updates can greatly impact engagement with your audience. Much like a radio station, post at the wrong time of day and your audience isn’t tuned in. Or, publish too frequently, and your audience tunes you out. Facebook Analyticsis a great way to understand when you gain and lose fans as well as which content performs well, so that you can continually tweak your posting habits for maximum effectiveness.

3. Content syndication partnerships
Most media properties operate with limited resources. This means that there is only so much content that a publisher can research, develop, edit, and publish for its audience. Similarly, there are only so many promotional resources available to gain new audience. Through content syndication partnerships, publishers can mutually benefit by helping to fill the other’s needs. In this arrangement, one publisher agrees to provide a certain number of articles per month to the other, and in return has the benefits of increased SEO value, brand awareness, and traffic from its partner site.

At Mashable, we recently launched the Mashable Publisher Platform, which is an editorially-curated experience allowing us to curate content from nine publisher partners that help to expand Mashable’s breadth and depth across a variety of verticals. In exchange, we haveprovided these partners dedicated publisher modules on each of their articles that promotes subscription to the publisher’s social presences and includes links to top headlines on the publisher’s site.

4. Mobile and location access
Through mobile devices, users have access to and are accessible from just about anywhere. Even if your brand doesn’t have the resources to develop its own mobile or tablet app, it can still engage with users by piggybacking on other successful or heavily-used apps. One example is Foursquare, which allows brands to create their own presences as well as leave tips for users at various locations. Another example is to contract with a mobile service provider that converts websites into mobile versions for any mobile operating system. While these mobile versions may lack some of the bells and whistles of a fully-developed app, they are a great and low-cost way to create a mobile presence that might be lacking otherwise. Apps are certainly growing in usage, but an early summer report by mobile analytics firm, Flurry, highlights that web consumption (desktop and mobile combined) was nearly the same amount of time per day as mobile apps.
While mobile web usage may be in decline compared to native apps, your audience may still come across the mobile version of your site outside of an app.

5. Licensing and monetization
Content distribution doesn’t have to be a revenue-free activity. Reprints and permissions services represent a media brand and its content to create licensing opportunities such as use of that brand and content by other websites, book publishers, advertisers and agencies, conferences and many other types of parties.

Holidays May Herald The Year Of The Mobile Shopper

By Andria Cheng
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--When the holiday shopping frenzy of 2011 kicks off later this month, it could be the year of the mobile shopper.
A record number of consumers will shop from their mobile devices this coming season, according to a forecast from IBM Coremetrics, which studies online data
from 500 leading U.S. retailers. And retailers seeking to tap into that trend will be forced to adapt.
"It's going to play a big part of how consumers are buying this holiday," said John Squire, chief strategy officer of IBM Coremetrics, in an interview. "Mobile users
have less patience. They are surgical shoppers. Retailers are going to have to do a really good job in targeting their messages and promotions for mobile users."
A mobile device shopper spends an average of about 4 minutes on a site, compared to a little over seven minutes for a site visit from a regular computer.
Mobile shoppers also tend to do less browsing and look at fewer products when they shop, making it more imperative for retailers to personalize messages and
content to cater to such visitors.
Among the retailers that have earned plaudits for targeting mobile users are department stores including Macy's Inc. (M) , Nordstrom Inc. (JWN) and J.C. Penney
Co. (JCP). All have launched apps based on streamlined pages specifically for mobile use, and fast downloads, designed as an alternative to conventional Web
browsing, Squire said.
As an illustration that their online and mobile strategy has paid some dividends, the department store group has posted above-average 20% online sales growth in
each month of the year so far. Adds Squire: "Retailers that saw these trends early have made some good bets and investments."
For the first time, the percentage of shoppers buying from their mobile phones is expected to rise above the double-digit threshold to 15% in November, compared
to 4.5% in last year's holiday season, and less than 1% in 2009, Squire said.
In October, 9.6% of online shoppers made purchases through their mobile devices, up from 3.4% a year earlier.
It's not just department stores that are catching on. Retailers across the board, from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Home Depot Inc. (HD) to Gap Inc. (GPS) and
Victoria's Secret parent Limited Brands Inc. (LTD) have been ramping up efforts to expand their online and mobile sales.
Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD) said earlier this week that its namesake department stores and Kmart discount chain is unveiling mobile "shopping walls" located in
high-traffic areas, including movie theater lobbies, airports and bus stations. The spaces will display so-called QR (quick-response) computer-generated bar-matrix
codes for each featured toy so shoppers can buy directly from their smartphones.
Increased mobile uses and purchases also have put extra pressure on retailers including electronics giant Best Buy Co. (BBY) as consumers comparison shop from
their mobile devices while in stores.
To win over consumers doing comparison shopping and encourage early buying, Wal-Mart this holiday season will match its competitors' print advertised prices
between Nov. 1 and Dec. 25, a much bigger time window. The company also will match prices offered on Walmart.com if the prices are different form their store
prices.
Retailers also have been more proactive arming their employees with iPads or other tablet devices to better service shoppers. Sears, for instance, began rolling out
iPads and iPod Touch devices in about 450 of its Sears and Kmart stores to help customers check inventory, access product information and order products online.
Within the mobile arena, retailers may want to pay even more attention to iPad users. About 6.8% of October site visits through the iPad concluded with a purchase,
compared to a 3.6% rate on other mobile devices, Squire said.

Online sales in November are expected to rise 12% to 15% this year, IBM estimated. By comparison the National Retail Federation has forecast total holiday sales
to rise just 2.8%.
Social networks, led by Facebook, also have been an emerging factor in retail. According to the IBM data, 9.2% of consumers in October that came to a retailer's
web site from a social media site made a purchase, compared to 5.5% who visited the store site directly.
-Andria Cheng; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com

WSJ.com

Double-Digit Growth of Local Search in Online Portals and Internet Yellow Pages.

As online search activity continues to grow in usage and intensity, new data show local searches now account for 13 percent of all core search activity on top web search portals as of January 2011. Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) and local search sites also exhibited strong growth with 5.6 billion local searches in 2010, a 15 percent increase over 2009.

The State of Local Search study conducted by comScore, Inc. looks at the online local search industry and explores local business search behaviors, highlighting usage trends and profiling searchers and their engagement with search options.

Brand Recognition Key Driver of Internet Yellow Pages Searches

In the survey, 58 percent of respondents who choose an IYP site first, like DexKnows, Superpages, Yellowbook and YP.com, do so due to brand recognition and reputation. Nearly a third (30 percent) indicated they chose an IYP site first because of its reputation for local business information.

Portal searchers were more likely to conduct local searches as part of broad information gathering, while primary IYP searchers reported conducting local searches to look for contact information with specific products or services in mind. Despite differences in usage frequency and site preference, over half of local business searchers choosing portal or IYP sites as primary local search sites, are highly satisfied and find success in their search experience.

"The comScore study proves that convenience, trust, and brand are all important in attracting the local searcher," said Neg Norton, president, Local Search Association. "We know that consumers consult multiple sources of information, but the local search providers that offer all three attributes to the consumer will be in a good position to deliver to the advertiser. Internet Yellow Pages retains a significant level of brand recognition and reputation among consumers – with 58 percent citing the brand as a reason for visiting – which reinforces the value of IYP sites for local businesses."

Apps Use for Mobile Search Skyrockets While Online Local Coupon Adoption Grows

The study shows significant growth in mobile local search use, which provides opportunities for local businesses to engage with potential customers via mobile. In January 2011, 77.1 million mobile subscribers accessed local content on a mobile device, up 34 percent from the previous year. Local content users accounted for 33 percent of mobile subscribers, with 87 percent owning a GPS-capable handset (up 9 percent from the previous year).

An analysis of core mobile usage behaviors showed local content dominating, as mobile subscribers increasingly turn to their mobile phones for information on maps, weather, traffic, retail and other local content.

App use for mobile local content grew 34 percent, with 56 percent of respondents using apps for local content. Browsers lead in usage of local content with 73 percent, dropping from 75 percent last year. Local content via SMS dropped to 25 percent from 30 percent.

Online daily deal offers and discounts have also emerged as an additional customer acquisition channel for local businesses. The comScore study found that primary IYP searchers were less likely to report purchasing online daily deal coupons for local businesses than business searchers on other sites (27 percent vs. 38 percent).

"Daily deals represent a big opportunity for Internet Yellow Pages," said Gillian Heltai, Senior Director at comScore. "We see many new entrants to the daily deal space, but awareness is a big issue; with IYP sites already interacting with local business searchers that are in the purchase funnel, there is the prospect of intercepting shoppers who are looking to buy and could become return customers."

"The market is changing so rapidly that small businesses need a trusted advisor to help them sort through the complexity," said Norton. "This is particularly true with trends in the mobile space and daily deals. Small- and medium-size businesses are still working to understand how to be effective and use these tools to their advantage."

Play Before Work: Games Most Popular Mobile App Category in US

From Mashable

Games continue to be the most popular app category, and according to Nielsen research, 93 percent of app downloaders — those who have downloaded an app within the past 30 days –  are willing to pay for the games they play. In contrast, only 76 percent of downloaders are willing to pay for news apps.

Among smartphone consumers who have played mobile games in the past 30 days, those with iPhones, Windows 7 phones or Android phones are the most likely to have downloaded the games they played, while those with Blackberry phones or featurephones tend to play pre-loaded games.  The average mobile gamer plays an average of 7.8 hours a month.  Those with iPhones tend to play around 14.7 hours each month while those with Android smartphones play around 9.3 hours per month.

A wbsite that is built as a video game

Cool Stuff!  Leave it to Google.

The Hottest Trend in E-commerce? M&A

A correction has been made in this story. See below for details.

To shoppers, a deal often means a good price. But the hot space in retail right now is wheeling and dealing -- snatching up startups.

E-commerce has been the most active segment in digital media and advertising mergers and acquisitions thus far in 2011, with 67 transactions topping $6 billion so far, according to investment bank Petsky & Prunier, which specializes in the sector. That far outpaces last year's $180 million in activity for the same period.

"What's most interesting is now you see offline and traditional retailers move into the e-commerce sector," said Bob Ennis, managing director of Petsky. "Big, well-capitalized companies are recognizing that e-commerce is becoming indistinguishable from commerce, period."

The entire retail category is driving toward segments such as mobile, tablets and social media -- leading to a veritable alphabet soup of new sales channels, from m-commerce to t-commerce to s-commerce and even f-commerce (that's mobile, tablet, social and Facebook commerce, for the uninitiated). Here's a primer.

M- & T-COMMERCE

As more and more smartphones hit the market -- 72.5 million Americans over 13 are toting them, according to ComScore -- phones are becoming shopping assistants, marketing and loyalty tools, a portal to online purchases and a replacement for consumers' wallets.

Consumers are already spending on their mobile devices. Mobile shopping, excluding travel in the U.S., doubled last year to more than $3.4 billion, according to ABI Research, while travel purchases add another $1.5 billion. Already eBay is seeing significant revenue from mobile, with sales of $2 billion in 2010, more than triple 2009 levels.

And it's not just phones. Many retailers report that half of what they consider to be mobile traffic comes via tablets, according to a Forrester Research report. Tablets (t-commerce) are expected to be a big driver of mobile commerce because they are better-suited to browsing, and will likely steal share from desktop- or laptop-based shopping, wrote Forrester principal analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

Still, mobile has sidled up to the in-store experience as a shopping aid or way for customers to find products

or services in proximity. That's why *eBay snapped up barcode-scanning app Red Laser, after consumers flocked to the app to price-compare in stores. Then eBay scooped up location-based service Where, which helps consumers find the products and services closest to where they're standing. Groupon, which popularized daily group deals, has also begun making moves toward a mobile app. After acquiring mobile developer Mob.ly last year, it's since launched Groupon Now. The app helps consumers find activities or meals in an instant when they, say, walk out the door of their office, looking for a lunch spot. Groupon has also purchased an early Foursquare competitor, Whrrl, to layer customer loyalty into its mobile services. "It plays perfectly to mobile: anywhere, anytime I can react, which a PC can't do," said Mark Beccue, senior analyst for ABI Research. "It's the impulse buy on steroids."

The latest frontier in the category is mobile wallets, which has tech companies such as Google, as well as credit-card companies and wireless carriers, scrambling to be first. Google is shipping phones with chips that allow touch-to-pay, and it acquired mobile-payments firm Zetawire to enable entirely mobile-based transactions with select bank- and credit-card partners.

F- & S-COMMERCE

Consumers' ability to share items and opinions with friends, as well as buy directly on sites where they already spend time socializing, has caught retailers' attention. In total, Americans spent the equivalent of more than 100 years (53 million minutes) on Facebook during March, according to ComScore.

Express, JCPenney, Walmart and 1-800 Flowers are just a few of the companies seeing big opportunity in social commerce. Express called s-commerce the "next step in our evolution as a retailer" when it announced earlier this month that its full product assortment would be available on Facebook. And Walmart cited the influence of social networking on shopping habits when it purchased Kosmix, a social-media filter.

Still, in a recent Booz & Co. report, the firm called the market for s-commerce "embryonic" but rapidly evolving, estimating that revenue from s-commerce will reach $30 billion globally in the next five years. A 2010 survey by the firm found that 27% of those who had spent at least one hour a month on social- networking sites and had bought at least one product online in the previous year would be willing to purchase physical goods via a social-networking site.

Some such as 1-800Flowers.com and Shoebuy.com are also seeing success in tempting consumers with virtual goods. IFeelGoods, for example, has run promotions with both retailers offering Facebook Credits in lieu of traditional discounts or coupons. In one such program, 1-800Flowers offered consumers 50 Facebook Credits -- the equivalent of $5 -- and logged 4,000 transactions.

But despite the enthusiasm of some, others are increasingly skeptical about Facebook's potential to drive e- commerce. Forrester recently published a report acknowledging the "few pockets of success" but calling Facebook's ability to drive revenue "elusive" and saying that the site is "unlikely to correlate directly to near- term sales."

CPG E-COMMERCE

Major players are also waking up to the potential of packaged-goods e-commerce. In recent months, the likes of Walgreens and Amazon have bought their way further into the space with the purchase of Drugstore.com and Quidsi -- owner of Diapers.com, Soap.com and BeautyBar.com -- respectively.

Amazon's deal highlighted the potential for selling consumer staples online. Household products, like toilet paper, shampoo and cleaning supplies, account for a small but rapidly growing slice of online sales. Last year, online sales of such products were nearly $10 billion, up from $4 billion in 2003, according to Nielsen.

Likewise, Walgreens has been working to strengthen its e-commerce and mobile-commerce offerings, as well as get a leg up on competitors CVS and Rite Aid.

"Our acquisition of Drugstore.com today significantly accelerates our online strategy," Greg Wasson, president-CEO of Walgreens, said at the time. "This acquisition offers a unique opportunity that will provide us immediate access to more than 3 million savvy, online loyal customers, and will allow us to move even closer to our existing customers through relationships with new vendors and partners, adding approximately 60,000 products to our already strong online offering."

By: Natalie Zmuda, Kunur Patel

Digital - Advertising Age

~~~

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Amazon, and not eBay, acquired barcode-scanning app Red Laser.

Mobile Marketing rising, Social Media Marketing needs Help.

IBM announced that mobile marketing is on the rise but social media marketing expectations have tempered, according to results from its global survey of marketers, titled “The State of Marketing 2011.” The sample, conducted by Unica, covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes.
Results revealed a number of key findings, including the urgent need to turn data into action, the increasing recognition of mobile’s marketing power, social media marketing growing pains, and a desire for more integrated technology solutions.
Growing Use of Mobile: More than 40 percent currently use mobile marketing tactics and another 20 percent plan to do so within the year, as more consumers rapidly adopt connected mobile devices.
Social Media Expectations: More than half of marketers use social media, but based on responses, their enthusiasm is tempered, suggesting that the peak of inflated expectations has passed; marketers are focused on finding the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights and actions.
Marketers Ready to Bridge the ‘Data Analysis to Action’ Gap: Nearly 60 percent of respondents listed “measurement, analysis and learning” as their top information technology (IT) bottleneck, whereas last year, they overwhelmingly viewed “IT support of marketing needs” at the top. More than 60 percent identified “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue.
Marketing Technology in Demand: Nearly 90 percent of respondents expressed interest in an integrated marketing suite, as the industry’s need for technology grows and adoption matures. More than half of marketers cited technology as the key to productivity, in particular, to resolving the challenges of meaningful measurement and analysis, and to choosing the next best course of action.
Marketing Silos Limit Cross-Channel Marketing: Marketers believe in the concept of Interactive Marketing, but have more progress to make toward this vision. While responses suggest that interest in achieving truly integrated cross-channel dialogs with customers is high, nearly half of survey participants report that they are only partially achieving that goal. The key barrier is organizational structure and internal processes. Regardless, 57% report the adoption of inbound marketing methods (personalized targeting/messaging) in their web channels.

Measuring Marketing Effectiveness is Critical: Marketers are getting more serious about using cross- channel attribution to understand marketing effectiveness. In the ranking of top marketing issues, “attributing success to marketing” took the second spot. Those marketers who adopt an interactive marketing strategy will have a centralized view of marketing touches or one view of the history of marketing interactions with customers.
“’More’ is certainly the key word for our times. But as the results of our annual survey of marketers reveal, the proliferation of marketing channels and the simultaneous explosion of data pose a wealth of challenges for marketers in 2011,” said Paul McNulty, EMM Marketing, IBM. “Marketers are looking for ways to turn more marketing possibilities into better marketing results.”
To download complete report CLICK HERE.

Digital Convergence in the Multicultural Home

Hispanics most interested in multiplatform viewing devices.

As internet and broadband penetration approach saturation in much of the US audience, future growth will come from minority groups, like Hispanics. And research suggests multicultural audiences will be adopting new digital technologies throughout the living room, not just on the PC.
A Terra/comScore survey found that Hispanic internet users were more likely to both own and plan to buy several cutting-edge technologies. iPads and tablets topped the wish list, with 30% of Hispanics planning to buy one in 2011. Nearly one-fifth already owned one. This compares to 21% of non-Hispanics planning to buy one and 8% owning one. Internet-enabled TVs, ebook readers and 3-D TVs also garnered extra interest among Hispanics.

Hispanics were also more interested than the general market in a variety of digital media experiences, including watching major sports and entertainment events via live online streams or product demonstrations conducted on iPads, and were more likely to enjoy innovative marketing efforts on these channels.
A study by Horowitz Associates likewise found that multicultural consumers were more involved in cross-platform viewing experiences. Almost half of Hispanic respondents watched TV content online, compared with 35% of whites. In addition, 22% of Hispanics watched TV on a handheld device, vs. 15% of white respondents.
Hispanics are an especially attractive demographic segment for marketers. In a separate comScore study, Hispanics were found to have much more positive associations with advertising. They considered ads to be more enjoyable, entertaining and helpful than did non-Hispanics.

“What's especially interesting is that engagement with advertising has more to do with narrative elements and storytelling than it does with actually running the advertisement in Spanish,” noted Josh Chasin, chief research officer at comScore.
As for where they will eventually purchase those gadgets, Wal-Mart and Best Buy were nearly tied with 30% and 27% of Hispanics having shopped there, respectively, in the past year for electronics, according to Scarborough Research. Target came in third, visited by 16% of Hispanics, while RadioShack, Sears, Kmart, Costco, and Sam’s Club all ranged from 6% to 8%.

©2011 eMarketer Inc. All rights reserved. www.emarketer.com