CMOs Plan Big Spends on Social Media
How are marketers across the United States allocating their marketing budgets? The CMO Survey organization set out to answer this question. Its report on social media spending during August 2016 indicated that marketers spend an average of 11.7 percent of their annual budget on social media. This data is based on 427 top marketers in the U.S.
Social Media Spending in Five Years
This is a notable increase from the average of 7.1 percent back in August 2011. The rate of spending varies from sector to sector, but it is most profound with B2C services (15.4 percent of total marketing budget). And chief marketing officers (CMOs) are not anticipating things to slow down. They expect to spend 22.2 percent of their annual marketing budget on social media five years from now. Expect major growth in social media advertising.
Why Spending May Double
Why is this increase in spending likely to occur? Integrating social media with content marketing strategies allows marketers to enhance their targeting options, improve their conversion tracking, and expand their mobile capacities. Social media provides marketers with insights that typical analytics software can’t. They can use these platforms to build organic and visible fanbases​ for their businesses, in addition to exposing them to greater forms of social media advertising.
On top of that, marketers are becoming more competitive in attracting the interaction of users through Facebook and the like. And CMOs understand that using social media for content marketing is not as simple as sharing posts like the average user on Facebook or Twitter. There’s a lot that goes into lead generation and conversion optimization through these platforms.
Social media such as Facebook offers a great opportunity to granularly target your audience, thus getting the right message to the right audience. Through social media you can target based on interests, demographics, geography, age, etc. The size of the audience, though, depends on your budget, and how well you can define your goals.
Targeting is great, but you have to compete against other businesses to get the attention of your target audience. You have to allocate your budget wisely and monitor ads and sponsored posts to see what works for you and your content strategy. Depending on your industry, however, you may have to invest more in order to gain visibility.
The ability to target like this can result in higher conversions if you match the content language to your target audience. Managing to get the right message to the right audience at the right time can result in higher ROIs or conversions, helping you obtain your overall marketing goal. Great successes have been seen by optimizing ad copy and targeting, incentivizing CMOs to invest more in social media ads.
Also, aside from knowing your target audience, it’s important to optimize social media content for different mobile devices. People are spending more than 70 percent of their social media time on mobile devices, so not having mobile optimized content could cost you.
CMOs are realizing the importance and impact that social media can have on their marketing. As the trends show, more and more investment is going into this field. With the start of 2017 just around the corner, it’s vital that business take another look at their social media advertising strategy and ensure that it supports their overall marketing strategy to drive better results in the year to come.
Want to learn more? See how Revel Systems got 619x more leads through Facebook Lead Ads.
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