Difficult To Prove Impact Of Social Media Investments: COMOs Survey

ByTeam Witszen

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are increasingly allocating resources to social media, but an alarming number are not seeing concrete return on this investment, according to The CMO Survey.

Only 15 percent of the 410 CMOs surveyed by professor Christine Moorman of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business said they have proven quantitative impact on their social media marketing expenditures. Another 36 percent responded they have a good sense of the qualitative impact, but not the quantitative impact.

Almost half of the CMOs surveyed (49 percent) have not been able to show that their company’s social media activities have made a difference. Despite this, marketers are expected to increase expenditures in social media from 6.6 percent to 15.8 percent over the next five years.

Key Findings of the survey are:

  • Growth in marketing budgets is expected to increase 4.3 percent during the next 12 months. CMOs reported that changes in spending would increase 9.1 percent two years ago, indicating that this spending level is moving in a countercyclical fashion to the overall economy
  • The change in digital marketing expenditures has also leveled off to 10.1 percent (three years ago, this figure was 13.6 percent)
  • Twenty-four percent of respondents noted Western Europe as the highest international revenue growth market, followed by China and Canada (18 percent each)
  • Marketers are increasing their efforts in collecting data about online customer behaviors. Approximately 60 percent collected online customer behavior data for targeting purposes, and 88.5 percent are expected to increasingly do this over time
  • CMOs report only “average” contribution of marketing analytics to company performance (3.5 on a 7-point scale where 1 is “not at all” and 7 is “very highly”). This number has decreased from its first measurement a year ago when it was at 3.9

Learn more about the survey click 

Adapted From: Chief Marketing Officers Find It Difficult to Prove Impact of Social Media Investments

 

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