Many Marketers Paying Lip Service to Mobile, Social Channels

While the vast majority of consumers – and businesses – now regularly use a combination of e-mail, social media and mobile platforms, many in the marketing community still don’t leverage these media to provide a truly integrated customer experience, a new survey by Portland-based digital agency eROI has found.

EROI’s April survey of 500 marketers included a mix of B2B and B2C organizations, as well as companies that do both. One of the survey’s main findings was that while awareness of mobile marketing is high, few marketers have taken the time to truly understand the platform. More than three-quarters of marketers are either not offering, or are unaware of, mobile versions of their websites and/or landing pages, while 68 percent are providing only limited versions of their websites.

“The big thing is that mobile is here and while a lot of marketers talk about it, not a lot of people are doing it right,” said eROI VP-Products Jeff Mills.

With social media, the survey found marketing participation is higher, but noted many in the industry still don’t have a clear strategy, which causes them to focus on the wrong success metrics and conclude their social media programs are more effective than they may actually be. For instance, the majority of marketers cited increase/decrease of friends and followers and traffic from social networks to their site. Only about a third said they tracked new leads and sales, the traditional measures on an online campaign’s success.

On a positive note, the survey did find nearly two thirds of marketers surveyed are incorporating social media into existing e-mail marketing efforts, with many leveraging the most popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube into their e-mail marketing programs.

Mills said, “E-mail marketing is still the golden child of marketing because no one can tell you how effective social media is, so it’s never going to be able to get the budget and mind-share that tracked mediums can.”