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As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

around half of respondents said their marketing data and technology are either managed separately (10%) or that only some tools are integrated (41%). Just 4% reported having a completely integrated stack.

respondents averaged 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts, with some using hundreds.

About 1 in 5 respondents said they have used Twitter in conjunction with a TV campaign. Promoted Tweets are the most popular of Twitter’s ad formats among respondents, used by about twice as many as promoted accounts, and by roughly three times as many as have used Twitter Amplify. Respondents’ primary goal for Twitter advertising is to build awareness and sentiment for their brand, with significantly fewer claiming as their main goal driving traffic to their websites, building followers, generating sales leads, selling products and staying in touch with customers.

58.6% share of respondents said that their Twitter budgets represent new spending. Those reallocating from other media are most commonly turning to offline (17.6%), online display (16.6%), email (12.3%), search (10.8%) and TV (9.9%) for funds. (Similar data concerning the constitution of online video and social media budgets can be found here and here.)

7 in 10 respondents – execs at marketers, agencies and media companies – use Twitter as a marketing channel, only a minority (46.5%) of those are spending on advertising on the platform. By comparison, a previous survey from Ad Age (covered here) found that of the 83% using Facebook, almost three-quarters were buying ads.

550 businesses with less than 100 employees in the U.S. and found that only 3 percent of their total advertising dollars flowed online, compared to as much as 16 percent for big companies.

most of these business do not have a professional marketing person whose job is to drive marketing," Rose said. "It's pretty hard for them to winnow their way through the 20 to 40 unsolicited requests they get a month to use digital marketing product A versus digital marketing product B."

A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate: Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.

Colleges try to leverage the social media savvy of their students with “social media ambassador” programs that help them advertise to prospective new students, raise the schools’ profiles, and educate their current students about school programs. And for some influencers, like Giannulli, college can be a windfall, landing them brand deals to market dorm furnishings, Victoria’s Secret underwear, and tooth-straightening solutions to their fellow students. For others, college just gets in the way of their real passion.

Becoming a social media star is the fourth most popular career aspiration for Gen Z

watching on-campus vloggers is how many students get a sense of the university’s culture—sort of like a franker, digital version of a campus tour.

What do you see in the market supporting your idea that ad tech and mar tech won’t converge? MARTIN KIHN: The business models are different. Marketing tech works on a subscription model, which means it’s predictable. The media model [in ad tech] is high-risk and difficult to predict. And those budgets come from different places. Mar tech budgets are more capital expenses, with an annual planning cycle.

Anything around identity is hot right now: something that can map devices together, or people to records in the world, is a good asset. Oracle acquired Crosswise. Acxiom bought LiveRamp. The other areas would be around analytics, companies developing insight decisions and customers. Those are companies like Tinyclues, Optimove, Adgorithms and Lytics.

The value of an off-the-shelf audience, like someone in the market for a car, becomes less valuable over time on a generic level. And DSPs used to differentiate on their access to inventory. Now you can go to Iponweb and use BidSwitch, and any DSP can access inventory outside of the walled gardens. They have to differentiate on service and on analytics.

A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

The video ads, which the company says are still being tested to a limited number of users, will start playing automatically as users scroll through their news feed, the central real estate in Facebook's desktop and mobile platforms. They will initially play without sound; users can stop the ad by scrolling past it in the news feed.

In a November survey of 735 Facebook users by global marketing consultancy Analytic Partners, 83% of users said they would find video ads "intrusive" and would likely "ignore" them.

Subway was among the companies that placed ads containing video that users had to start manually. Mr. Pace of Subway said roughly 88 million people saw the ad and "millions" of people clicked on it. "It worked pretty darn well," he added.

The company's newest marketing campaign, launched earlier this week, invites fans of Burt's natural skin and personal care products to receive eight different "moments" over eight weeks via online calendar notifications. The promotion is timed to coincide with the launch of Burt's Bees new Brightening skin care line, which promises to brighten users' skin in only eight weeks.

This will define the calendar category and other brands that sell on a subscription or seasonal basis will take notice,"

"We thought, what else needs a little brightening up? One look at our calendars, packed wall-to-wall with meetings and meetings-about-meetings, and we had our idea. Then we just went to work figuring out the best way to bring calendars back to life over an eight-week period,"

It’s not all mega-influencers, either. Micro-influencers, who have targeted followings under 100,000, make up the backbone of the industry. Even people with just a few thousand followers can earn hundreds of dollars for a single sponsored post. It’s not hard to earn an income this way. Eight-year-olds can do it, provided some adult supervision.

As the new coronavirus sends the world hurtling toward a recession, though, more glamorous trappings of the influencer lifestyle have come to a halt. Paid trips have no place amid lockdowns, nor do street-style photoshoots to model #sponsored clothes. And it’s not clear that those opportunities will reappear in the future—at least, not for everyone. “The pandemic is having a major impact on the overall influence industry, and it’ll likely have lasting effects,” says Seits.

Elyce is still able to make some money. Like many influencers, she tags her clothes and beauty products on LikeToKnowIt, a platform that connects her followers to the online retailers where they can shop her lifestyle.

40% of Internet users across the world don’t see any point in “friending” a brand online. In the U.S. and the U.K., that figure rises to 55% and 63%, respectively. In emerging markets, consumers were more open to it.

there’s evidence that they want to engage with a brand online so long as they get something out of it. For example, the majority of shoppers in the study said they are open to receiving an ad or promotion from a brand on their mobile device that’s tied to their location.

half of respondents in the study said they are interested in brands sharing other users’ brand or product experiences with them and 42% said they want brands to help them make better product choices.

Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other social factor, including Facebook likes/shares and Tweets.

“We have a lot of our clients whose titles are actually changing from SEO Manager to Content Strategist,” Dotterer said. “Search engine optimization sounds like you’re doing something to the engines themselves, but what you’re really doing is optimizing online content. You optimize it by changing the content you’ve already created to better fit the voice of the consumer. You also optimize by finding the gaps in the content so we can create more.”

The importance of content creation has encouraged more companies to get their SEO, social and creative teams more involved in content strategy,

Scientists have discovered that when we look at a smiley face online, the same parts of the brain are activated as when we look at a real human face. Our mood changes, and we might even alter our facial expressions to match the emotion of the emoticon.

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