A recent Nielsen survey of online users' habits found that 67% of all users were logging on to social network and blogging sites. Forrester’s recent survey notes that, despite the drop in marketing budgets, 53% of interactive marketers are increasing spend on social marketing. This is good news for marketers who are looking for inexpensive marketing and the opportunity to benefit from cost-effective word-of-mouth.
Interactive marketing programs thrive in a recession as they are fueled by measurable results. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. Comparatively, online communities, discussion forums and organic searches cost next to nothing.
Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, writes, "Even though the budgets are small and growing, we recommend to our clients, in order to be successful, not to approach social media marketing as experimental, but to put the right roles, process, and measurement capabilities in place to be effective."
Commenting on this trend, Rajiv Parikh, CEO, Position2 says, “Buyers research using search and social media. A recent study indicated that 80% of the time, decision makers found the vendor rather than the other way around. Information gained from search now is more influential than trade shows, trade publications, and even advice from paid consultants.”
This trend coupled with the recent dramatic change in customers’ behavior - longer buying cycles, more comparison shopping, and so on - have created an urgent need for a new online marketing mix that can address the changed customer buying process.
Position2, a leading Search & Social Media marketing firm, has developed a proprietary methodology called ‘Surround & Intent Marketing’ (SIM). The SIM suite maximizes customer response through a data-driven understanding of online behavior that predicts intent, and drives action through a dynamic combination of search and social media marketing. In other words, it enables online marketers to connect with customers at every stage of the buying process, and deliver relevant messaging at each stage. This results in measurably improved marketing performance.
Rajiv Parikh will conduct a webcast on ‘How to Achieve Continuous Growth in a Flat Market’ on 30th June 2009. The webcast will focus on leveraging SIM to achieve improved performance of online marketing programs.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Maanasi RK
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