The annual survey of marketers conducted in Q4 in 2010 showed how marketers around the world will use online tools to market their brand.

Good news for agencies and software firms. As the Unica survey of marketers showed, more firms are using social media as marketing tools and most of the big companies are planning to enhance their social media marketing efforts. On the other hand the marketers see a saturation in their social media marketing efforts and still have problems in justifying expenditures when it comes to social media marketing.

One key problem is that monitoring are still missing important tools and there is the need for better monitoring effectiveness. The ability to turn data into action can not be solved by conventional systems but is one of the most important requests by marketers. Marketers in the US have a strong demand for new software solutions and tend to rely more on IT, and software than agencies. European companies, on the other hand are more reluctant towards Software solutions and rather have a campaign produced by an agency. This might be due to the fact that Europe lags far behind America in terms of social media adoption.

Key findings:

Measurement, leraning and analysis is the biggest bottleneck for companies
Turning data into actions is the most important issue for companies
Improve software and technology infrastructure is a key issue for change
Social Media Monitoring is the most used software category
Organizational structure, corporate culture and internal process are the biggest barriers when it comes to adopting interactive marketing channels
Web Data is very important for decision making (but most can’t use the web data)
Reason for not integrating online and offline data: existing system and data are too disparate
66% of American and 31% of European Companies have adopted social media marketing tactics
Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) are the most used social media channels
Only 39% of all companies track their owned media
Only 30% of companies conduct a social segmentation
Mobile marketing is coming

Find the entire study here [pdf]

Unica s Annual Survey of Marketers 2011 v22

About the Author

Daniel is a social media enthusiast. He holds a BA in media and communication science and an MA in european business of the University of Fribourg. He founded some of Switzerland's largest sports blogs for skiing and snowboarding. Social media, sports and analytics is what he loves.