08 Mar
A recent E-Marketer story reports that marketers are planning to allocate a major portion of their budgets towards social marketing.
According to the report, respondents to the budgeting questions said that they would devote almost one-fifth of their marketing budgets to social media over the next five years.
The included charts give us a great visual for how marketers are increasing their funding for social media. The chart below shows us how business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers have allocated their budgets for their products and services.
An interesting stat pointed out in the report is that planned spending on social media has seen a steady increase from only six months ago.
I don’t think that this increase in social media funding is a response to hype or panic. We are too deep into the realm of social networking and at this point, if it were a fad, we would know about it. There are too many companies and marketers out there using it successfully. As the data shows us, as time passes, our budgets should be increasingly dedicated to social media marketing.
The industry’s easement into the social space is easy to see when reviewing E-Marketer’s data. Marketers are still hesitant to dive completely in with their budgets, and I can’t really blame them. I still think social media is in its infancy and I try to be cautious. I refuse to dive into the “next big thing” without researching it and making sure it’s conducive to my marketing strategy.