Report Shows Social Channel Effectiveness … Maybe

The latest report on marketing leadership is out from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Their survey of 5,000 marketers asks questions like what specific channels are you using for digital marketing, do you plan to increase your spend here, and so on. Reports like this don’t mean much to an individual company other than showing overall trends. But they’re still useful.

The study focuses on the digital space, so there’s no real comparison to off-line tactics or execution, but with that in mind, here’s my quick read of the report which surfaced a few interesting nuggets:

• Blogging is the one area that seems to be in decline. While 59 percent of respondents say it’s effective, that’s the lowest number reported among a couple dozen tactical areas. Blogging also has the highest degree of people saying it’s not very effective. This is disappointing to me. If positioned properly and with the target audience, not company, in mind, a blog can be a powerful search engine and customer magnet. Plus, you own it. You don’t own Facebook or Twitter.
• Social advertising is among the chief areas marketers say they’ll increase budgets for this year. That’s right in line with what should happen as Facebook and other channels ratchet down organic post reach. We’re going to have to think about paid media in our social planning from now on. It’s not fair, in my opinion — your social audience has opted in to see your content — but it’s the way of the world in Zuckerbergland.
• Quality of leads, new business development and customer acquisition are three of the top four problem areas marketers identified in relation to digital channels. Since social media is a major focus of digital marketing these days, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Social is a much more natural fit for customer retention rather than acquisition. Though I think the push toward social advertising is going to correct that frustration a bit.

Perhaps the most interesting chart in the report, at least to me, was the effectiveness rating of various social networks:

As expected, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn dominate the channel usage. Google+ and YouTube are hanging in there, but then there’s a huge drop-off in usage of blogging. Instagram, Pinterest and even podcasts are used by less than 34 percent of the total.

Pinterest, surprisingly, is only used by 24 percent and 15 percent of those say it’s not very or not at all effective.

More broadly, though, this chart seems to say that most marketers are mostly satisfied with the channels they are using. And that’s where I call bullshit. Finding a marketing manager or CMO to say, out loud, “We’re very happy with what we’re getting out of this social channel,” is like finding a fully inflated football at Gillette Stadium. They’re few and far between.

So while the data was gathered from 5,000 marketers, we have to question whether or not the bias of being asked by social companies (Salesforce Marketing Cloud and LinkedIn) had an effect. Sure, you can argue that if a CMO isn’t happy with what they’re getting out of a network, they’d stop using it, so the answers would be holistically biased to the positive.

Yes, if pressed, we could all find an effective use of any given channel. But the truth is — at least from talking to brands and agencies and business owners around the country — we aren’t typically doing that.

Are you or your clients satisfied with what you’re getting out of social channels? Do your experiences line up with this data? I’d be curious to know. It seems like reality and this report are a bit dissimilar.

The comments are yours.