With online marketing being such a massive industry, it becomes very difficult for advertisers to be sure that their ad dollars are going to the right places. A lot of the time, things work out just fine as far as ROI goes, and marketers use these results to plan their future advertising endeavors. However, a recent eMarketer article reports the results of a study conducted by InfoGroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive, showing exactly where marketers plan to let go of major portions of their advertising budgets in the near future. The results show that money will not be going aimlessly to ads that seem like they may just work, but rather marketers will be investing their dollars into data driven marketing campaigns.
According to the study results, a whopping 68% of respondents have plans of spending more in 2013 on marketing that is data driven or data related. Then, there are the 23% who will keep their spending in the way of data driven marketing as it is, potentially because they have already seen the success that it brings in the marketing scheme. Only 3% of respondents planned on decreasing their spending on data related marketing tactics, with 2% planning to decrease their spending only slightly, and 1% planning a great decrease in their data related marketing spending.
That brings to question where marketers plan on receiving this data for their marketing campaigns. Well, according to the study about 49% of respondents are saying that website analytics tools are their best bet. Another 19% said that receiving data from email campaigns would be their most efficient method for collecting customer data. Surprisingly, only about 12% said that collecting data from social media was their number one choice. Social media is quite popularly used by marketers today, so one would expect that this is where marketers would want to receive their data. However, website analytics will often bring much more useful data than can social media interactions, therefore placing it as the number one choice of nearly half of the respondents.
However, when it comes to social media data, eMarketer reports that there are big plans for its use in 2013. The study questioned marketers about plans of using social data for driving campaigns from other channels, and 36% who responded said that they did indeed have plans to bring social media data into the picture for their campaigns in 2013. There were 42% of respondents who had already started incorporating social data into their campaigns on other channels, and who plan to do so even more deeply this year. That left only 22% of marketers that really had no plans for social media data in their marketing campaigns for the year.
It seems data is the way to go, and one can easily understand why. A more educated marketing campaign is the one that is more likely to work, rather than a campaign built from scratch. Data provides marketers a tool that they can use to judge what the best decisions are, and which moves will bring in the best performance.
