You have to be careful when downloading white papers from the Internet as most are disguised to try and sell you on a new service. The latest is a report from Simply Measured on the State of Social Marketing. While the online marketers are trying to cut through online ad fraud, BOTS, and the decline of social media they actually suggest “social media is a growing focus for marketing teams: The percentage of social media teams that live within the marketing organization has grown from 49% in 2015 to 63.2% in 2016”. I work for/with a lot of consumer marketers and I can safely say that almost all of them are cutting social media marketing budgets and people.
Among the other insights from their brilliant team:
- Marketing teams have two distinct functions: To be stewards of the brand, and to drive revenue and demand. (Really, I would have never thought!)
- Measuring ROI is a massive problem: 61.1% of marketers identified “Measuring ROI” as their top challenge, and only 9.4% said that they’re able to quantify revenue driven by social. (Old news)
- Social media marketers don’t have the budget they need for analytics software: 76.5% of marketers say they aren’t getting the budget they need to do their best work, and 43% cite analytics software as their biggest need. (Of course they sell social media analytics software).
According to Michael Spence, Personal Brand Consultant at Freelance “if you haven’t been paying attention, the North American public are getting bored with social media. Even if 28% of our time online is spent on social media, there are some serious signs that digital apathy is leading to less engagement online”
The Wall Street Journal, in 2014, said “social media is taking up a bigger portion of marketing budgets, but few companies said they have been able to quantitatively measure its impact..” Also in 2014, Nate Elliot, from Forrester said “is there any doubt now that Facebook has abandoned social marketing, and that its paid ad products aren’t delivering results for most marketers?”.
This report is an embarrassment for Simply Measured and is not worth printing.
