Highlights from Chief Marketer’s 2011 Interactive Marketing Survey

The results are in from Chief Marketer‘s annual Interactive Marketing Survey, conducted between February and March of this year with 647 marketing professionals from both B2B and B2C.

Key insights into 2011’s interactive marketing budgets include:

• The average allocation to interactive marketing is 25.2% of total budget
• B2B marketers plan to devote more money to interactive than B2C (26.2% vs. 24%)
• 30% of the overall marketing spend will go toward digital campaigns this year
• B2B marketers are more likely to increase both their interactive budgets and their overall marketing spend than B2C

Strategically, the number one goal from interactive campaigns is to build brand awareness according to 79.2% of respondents. This is followed by driving consumers to website (61.5%), generating sales (61.0%), and generating leads (60.4.%).

What surprised us is that even though building brand awareness is the leading goal for their interactive campaigns, only 24.6% of respondents are measuring brand “lift.” This speaks to the power of brand and the renewed energy around brand building with the power of social media.

Other data points to note:

• Email marketing has held steady from 2010.
• Other mainstream tools such as social media (Facebook, LinkedIn), SEO, Twitter, Online Ads, Paid Search Ads, Social Media Ads, and Viral or Word-Of-Mouth campaigns are all seeing more use now than last year.
• Top 3 leading niche-marketing tools are webinars, blogs, and online contests.

The challenge for us marketers has always been measuring how well our interactive marketing campaigns are doing. What are the metrics that we use to determine whether or not we are successful? Responses indicate the top 5 metrics being watched currently are:

• Click-throughs (58.7%)
• Traffic to website (53.3%)
• Lead generation/user opt-in (43.3%)
• Page views (38.3%)
• Incremental sales (34.1%)

Yet marketers aren’t quite sure how cost-effective interactive marketing actually is. Those who think online campaigns are more profitable than offline declined nine percentage points this year (25.7% of respondents), whereas those who think online is less profitable than offline went up (9.3%). That being said, 29% of marketers simply don’t know if interactive is more or less profitable than offline methods.

What is clear is that any uncertainty about the ROI of interactive marketing is not making an impact on the pursuit of these key initiatives. Marketers across all industries agree that is far worse to be left behind than worrying about its cost-effectiveness right now.

Download your own copy of Chief Marketer’s 2011 Interactive Marketing Survey for more information.