ROI Is Top Concern for Marketing Execs

• Comment (2)
• Recommend (4)
• Tweet
• 

The inability to measure return on investment is the biggest problem facing social media advertising campaigns, according to marketing and advertising executives surveyed by an independent research firm on behalf of The Creative Group. Out of some 500 marketing and advertising execs polled on social media, 40% said measuring or defining ROI was the biggest challenge for their agencies or firms.

That makes measuring ROI by far the most frequently-cited issue in the survey. The next most-cited challenge, at 19%, was finding knowledgeable staff to execute social media tasks; meanwhile 13% of marketing and ad execs surveyed said finding budget for social media was their biggest issue, and 10% said gaining executive support for social media initiatives was their main challenge.

This is just the latest in a series of surveys showing that measuring ROI is the biggest issue holding back social media. In May I wrote about a survey of 329 brand executives by PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit for eMarketer, in which half the survey respondents said lack of standardized metrics for ROI was a big impediment for social media campaigns.

And in March I wrote about a survey of 283 corporate marketing decision makers, conducted by Research Now, which found 39% said their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough. Meanwhile 51% said that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI. Thirty-seven percent of respondents did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization, with 22% using brand awareness as their sole measure when evaluating their marketing spending.

• Comment (2)
• Recommend (4)
• Tweet
• 

2 comments on "ROI Is Top Concern for Marketing Execs".

1. Andrew Eklund from Ciceron
   

   commented on: July 12, 2012 at 5:19 p.m.
   How many of all of these concerns are related to one another? The need for ROI analysis is often related to a lack of executive buy-in (read: direct knowledge of social), and finding knowledgeable staff or resources is related to a lack of funding. This is an ecosystem problem that can only be solved at the very top with engaged and knowledgeable leadership. With that, everything else falls into place.
2. Brian Hayashi from ConnectMe 360
   

   commented on: July 12, 2012 at 6:03 p.m.
   Well, fundamentally the challenge is the difference between the tempo of business: the people in the executive suite are used to doing things monthly and quarterly; we have moved to a world where things are done in real-time. Or look at it a different way: At Coke, arguably one of the world's smartest marketers, you could tell how far ahead they were by the length of their planning cycles. That intimate understanding of their customers has translated into their ability to organize around the 'now' with minimal disruption compared to other marketers.

Leave a Comment