The Artful Dodger may be a beloved character, but feeling as if you’ve had your professional pocket picked isn’t quite as endearing. The numbers don’t lie. Chief Marketing Officers are having their pockets picked. They are being sold marketing activities that are little more than a bill of goods. The world of marketing spend is changing and you need to change with it.
The Bluetext team is regularly talking with CMOs at organizations ranging from mid-sized and emerging companies to some of the world’s largest global enterprises. They all struggle with how to allocate their budgets to most effectively achieve their marketing goals, including lead generation, thought leadership, sales enablement and brand awareness. CMOs who don’t analyze what is working and what is not fall victim to CMO Pickpockets, wasting money with no return for the investment. Here are just a few of ways that slippery fingers are reaching for their corporate wallets:
- The promise of in-your-face on-line banner ads is that they can’t be ignored. Yet, the downside can be substantial. 84 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant banners ads.
- In a surprisingly large amount of cases, on-line ads are lost in the noise. 31 percent of ad impressions are delivered (and thus paid for) yet never seen by customers.
- Direct mail can be one of the most costly outreach tactics. Yet 44 percent is never opened.
- The only sure-fire broadcast ads that viewers don’t skip are those on sporting events (virtually all sports fans watch in real time). Non-sports represent a much different story. Overall, 86 percent of people skip television ads.
- Facebook’s new algorithm makes it very difficult for businesses to reach their fans. In one recent test, a story with a link reached just 3 percent of those who had opted to “Like” the brand. Instead, companies who pay to be seen hit Facebook users even if those users haven’t enlisted as fans.
- While Americans are moving to mobile devices in droves, marketing professionals have yet to devote a significant share of their spending to mobile marketing. Consumers spend roughly 10 percent of their media time on mobile devices, but advertisers commit only one percent of the ad budgets there.
- Conversely, print publications get only about 7 percent of media users’ time, but advertisers spend 25 percent of their ad budgets on print.
These numbers show a large disconnect between how marketing budgets are allocated and how target customers spend their time and where they get information that informs their decisions. At Bluetext we know that there is no “one size fits all” solution. The marketing pie needs to be sliced very carefully to get the best results. We analyze campaigns and budgets against the habits of target audiences to make sure they map up closely and return that bang for the buck.
Sources:http://contently.com/blog/2012/05/25/the-benefits-of-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-infographic/; http://paidcontent.org/2012/01/19/419-comscore-study-a-third-of-ad-impressions-are-never-seen/; http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevecooper/2012/11/30/dealing-with-facebooks-unfriendly-new-algorithm/; http://www.minnpost.com/business/2013/02/goin-mobile-cloud-based-lifestyle-moving-fast