2010 Social Media Marketing Report

If you’ve ever wondered how those “big budget” SEO firms get things done, then think RESEARCH! They learn as much as they can, about as much as is possible, for their clients in all channels for all types of media. And can I tell you “where” they find that research to aid in their marketing campaigns?

Think marketingsherpa.com! That’s a marketing site that is chock full of various research, one can look over in all online channels, to help you and your clients (or if you are the client yourself too!) to learn about just how to succeed in marketing your site/services/products to succcess!

Billed as “a research firm specializing in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing (and what does not)…” they publish great research and this latest report is no surprise either! Social Media marketing is HOT-HOT-HOT and this report, though priced at almost $400 US, can help you plan out your own firms — or your clients — social media strategy plans to succeed at driving new traffic and revenue streams to your websites!

Let’s look at a short piece from their Report Excerpt, shall we?

This area concerns Social Media Budgets and how they will change in 2010 and this can be very important to the Marketing Department for any firm and here’s a pull quote from same… 

“Chances are your overall marketing budget was hit hard by the economy in 2009 and the prospect of recovering a substantial portion of these funds in 2010 is not very likely. But there is good news for social media marketers. This chart shows that social marketing will benefit from very significant budget increases in the year ahead no matter what industry your organization is in. What this chart doesn’t show is come.

“As a relatively new and rapidly emerging tactic, social media is generally funded by either increasing the overall budget or, more often than not in the current economic climate, by shifting funds from other marketing line items to social media. Social marketing budgets are growing at the expense of other tactics and a deeper dive into this study will show you which ones and to what extent.

The human factor will account for nearly 60% of social marketing expenditures next year including staff salaries for blogging, content development, social monitoring, etc. Another 20% of the budget will go outside the organization to agencies, consultancies and other social marketing service providers.”

This area points out rather specifically that yes, social media budgets will undoubtedly be increased as a result of decreasing budgets to other normal marketing channel expenditures…with over 60% of those budgets being salaries/payments etc made to staff/third parties for items like (ready for it?) blogging, content development and social media montoring! Imagine that, blogging salaries as more and more firms/SEO types turn towards social media as a tactic to increase their SEO Campaigns…

Ahh….good news IMHO and I hope you’d agree too, as we pointed out the results just a few weeks ago about how Blogs can help a firm or SEO practitioner to increase SEO rankings for clients! Truly good news!

Go to the site via this link here to get the copy of the Report Excerpt…read same, and then if you truly want to learn more – go here to the actual page for the purchase of same. Valid research, from a well known online marketing company with research reports available on many many topics for both clients and SEO practitioners, eh!

Oh, and do drop by the site too at least weekly — they publish a great “chart of the week” and this one below. I wanted to wanted to know how various organizations allocated their online marketing budgets for each of the following tactics, including personnel, media and other direct costs — and marketingsherpa.com provided just that info! And guess how much of that budget went to Social Media marketing and it appears that this is now in 2010 rated at 11%…all of which is good to know, eh?

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