News on Social Marketing, according to Search Engine Watch: According to the State of Search Marketing Report 2012, the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry in North America will reach an estimated value of $23 billion by the end of the year. In 2011, SEM has seen a growth rate of 19 percent which is projected by the report to increase to 13% in 2013.
The report was released jointly by Econsultancy and SEMPO.
The report shows that among smaller organizations, finding budget for SEM and social is challenging. Twenty one percent of respondents also consider hiring and retaining talent a key challenge.
For 86% of participating marketers, they expect digital budgets to increase from 77% in 2011 while a reduction of the budget is anticipated by just 4% of respondents.
The overall report shows that marketers want to integrate digital with all other channels, as part of their strategy.
The report states that, “Marketers want to centrally manage their channels, see results on a platform that brings in data from across their programs, and to understand how those channels interrelate in the customer journey.”
The State of Search Marketing Report 2012 included 883 respondents from 36 countries. Respondents from B2C and B2B focuses were almost evenly split, at 42 and 39 percent, respectively. SEMPO members can download this report from their SEM Research page.
Read more at SEMPO: North American SEM Industry to Reach $23 Billion in 2012
News on Google Marketing, according to TopRank: Even with the success of Google, marketers are increasingly looking for traffic alternatives to Google for social media optimization and marketing. They continue to look for alternative and/or additional channels for content distribution and marketing and consumers for sources of information and interaction.
Others suggest social search as an alternative but it could never replace search engines although, the rate of growth for major search engines will certainly be affected by the growing number of niche tools and specific media channels like social networks, social bookmarking sites, personalized search, tagging, podcasts, video blogs, regular blogs and other “social media.”
Social Media Optimization (SMO) has been considered by some bloggers as the next level of SEO, or SEO 2.0. as SEO has grown and developed to become more of a creative discipline. However, since web sites and servers are technical things, there will always be technical issues to be considered. The future of SEO will be defined by its creative and multi channel aspects of “pull marketing.”
Although clients are doing great on Google and the other major search engines, they still want to learn alternatives to Google traffic. SMO/SMM provides an excellent list that includes MySpace, Digg, YouTube and other viral tactics.
Read more at UnGoogle Your Marketing with Social Media
News on Social Marketing, according to Content Marketing Institute: According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Marketing Profs, they will be publishing their third annual research results: The 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America.
The report shows some of its key findings:
Content marketers are using more tactics
B2B content marketers are using more tactics (12) compared to the past 2 years (8). The most popular content marketing tactic reported was social media (excluding blogs) which has an 87 percent adoption rate. Except for print magazines which has remained at 31%, all tactics used like research reports, videos, mobile content, and virtual conferences have seen the biggest increases in adoption rates.
Content marketers continue to be uncertain about tactics
With the different tactics being used by marketers, they still don’t know how effective they will be as they still consider in-person events to be the most effective tactic (67%).
Distribution with social media has increased
Compared to last year’s rate of seventy four percent, 87% of marketers are now using social media to distribute content. However, Twitter as last year’s leader, was edged by LinkedIn as the channel having the highest adoption rate.
Content marketers are spending more
Content marketers are spending more of their marketing budgets on content marketing (33%) compared to 26% last year. And for the next 12 months, majority of respondents (54%) say they will be increasing their content marketing spending.
Fewer marketers are outsourcing content
B2B’s use of in-house teams for content creation has shifted as only 44% of companies are reportedly outsourcing these efforts.
Producing enough content is the biggest challenge
The report shows that for this year,64% of B2B marketers considers producing enough content as their biggest challenge compared to last year’s study that shows producing the kind of content that engages as marketers top challenge.
Read more at 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends [Research Report]
Other Social Marketing Articles of Interest
Peeking Into the World Of Google’s Algorithm Changes With Google Search Quality Head Amit Singhal