Brands are gaga for social media, crazed over mobile, and hyped about video. As important as these formats are as advertising and marketing tools, it is important to view emerging media with an educated eye. Many marketers are beyond the experimental phase, and their learnings, along with developing trends, should be considered as brands plan their budgets.
Consumer brand logos are everywhere in the social media space. According to Business.com, two-thirds of business-to-consumer companies have a social network profile page and half use Twitter. Social media budgets across all industry sectors this year were expected to balloon from 43 percent to 79 percent, according to MarketingSherpa.
Yet the way brands are spending those social media dollars is changing dramatically. For one thing, advertising is becoming less important as the primary revenue driver. More important, social media is not confined to social networks, or even digital media. Instead, it is spreading across all marketing.
Brands are starting to see that the most critical social media expenditures are not in the realm of buying paid advertising but in building out infrastructure and a strategy to enable social media to transform their businesses. That means money will be allocated from marketing budgets, not media budgets.
What will marketers demand for their buck? No. 1: Information. Not just information gleaned by listening to their customers, but by listening to those noncustomers whose opinions are shaped by the social interactions and commentary of others. As customers and customers-to-be drive the conversation, they will increasingly drive the evolution of a company's brand.
As brands become the property of consumers, rather than companies, the notion of earned media is more important. Earned media are brand engagements a business doesn't pay for, which range from blog posts to Facebook updates to virtual gifts.
Does earned media work? Ask Nestle. The chocolate maker sent more than 1.1 million Nestle Toll House cookie virtual gifts on Facebook over two weeklong periods in fall 2009, Ad Age reported. About 3 percent of recipients opened the gifts. Compare that to Nestle's banner click-through rate on Facebook: about 0.04 percent.
As social media has matured, mobile marketing, too, has finally arrived. But where is it headed next? eMarketer predicts mobile ad spending will rise from $416 million in 2009 to $593 million in 2010 -- a spike of 42.5 percent. That's not surprising as more brands and agencies integrate mobile into their marketing mix. Plus, Google's acquisition of AdMob is certain to prompt greater interest in the mobile space from agencies, brands, and media companies alike.
Noah Elkin, eMarketer's senior analyst, mobile, says, "The fusion of mobile and social and the appetite for apps (among both consumers and brands) will continue unabated." Location apps will be a key avenue for brands looking to engage consumers on the go.
Brands are taking advantage of consumers' proclivity to keep friends on their radar and reveal their own locations wherever they may wander. Loopt, for example, helped establish the practice of "checking in" to find nearby friends, places, and activities. Foursquare added a gaming element to compete to earn badges and points based on the number of times users visit a particular location.
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