Many have speculated that ad dollars would be shifting primarily toward mobile in the coming year, and for years after that. Focusing mostly on this, there are some out there who have neglected to consider how much growth social media still has in its near future. However, those out there who still have social media fresh on their minds are excited, and a recent article from eMarketer explains just how these marketers plan to treat social media in 2013. According to the company, 64 percent of advertisers have plans to further increase their social media ad budgets for the remainder of 2013.
In their article, eMarketer reports numbers coming from a study conducted by Digiday, which was done on behalf of Vizu, a digital brand measurement provider. With 64 percent of respondents planning on an increase, there were only 2 percent of marketers that planned on decreasing their ad budgets for 2013. While 34 percent of marketers had plans of keeping their social ad budgets as they are today, the majority of marketers see a great potential for growth in social media for 2013.
Although the majority of those marketers that planned for an increase had intentions of bringing their social ad budgets up by only 10 percent or less, there were still around 26 percent that said they planned on an increase of over 11 percent.
Most of those increasing their spending on ads on social sites planned to do so by 10% or less. But a significant number were making even larger investments: 26% of respondents reported planning to increase their social media ad spending by 11% or more. However, social still does not seem to be dominating the priorities of marketers in terms of budget allocation. In fact, 70 percent of marketers planned on spending only about 1 to 10 percent of their budgets on social media marketing efforts. There were only about 13 percent of respondents that will send over 21 percent of their budgets toward social.
As it has been for some time now, marketers that plan on continuing to use social media in 2013 see it primarily as a way to increase brand awareness and manage online reputation or presence. Of the advertisers surveyed, 45 percent will use social media for this reason alone. Only 16 percent said that social media would be used primarily for direct-response related efforts, such as driving visits to a company website.
For the entire span of 2013, eMarketer believes that advertisers in the United States will spend upward of $4.1 billion for paid social media advertising. By 2014, the company states, this number will rise all the way to $5 billion. Social media has always been expected to continue growing at a pretty steady pace, but the excitement about things like mobile advertising have drawn a few eyes away from it. However, it appears that marketers still have big plans for social in the near future, and we can only hope that the innovations in the way of social media marketing resources continue to appear as constantly as they recently have been.
