• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, September 8, 2014

Chief marketing officers plan to devote 21.4% of their total marketing budgets into social media spending over the next five years, according to the latest edition of The CMO Survey, a poll of 351 marketing execs by the American Marketing Association, Duke University and McKinsey and Company. That’s more than double the current proportion of 9.4% of marketing budgets devoted to social media today, and the 13.2% predicted for a year from now.

Meanwhile CMOs with companies offering business-to-business products plan to devote around a fifth (19.9%) of their total marketing budgets into social media five years from now, and 12.6% within a year. Those figures rise to 22.2% and 13.3% for the five-year and one-year forecasts, respectively, among companies offering B2B services.

Despite the clear enthusiasm for social media, many marketers still aren’t sure what, exactly, they’re getting for their money: 45% of respondents said they aren’t sure what impact social media spending is having on their sales, while 40% said they have seen qualitative evidence of a positive impact, but as yet no quantitative evidence. Asked how well they believe social media is integrated into their overall marketing strategies, CMOs gave it a ranking of just 3.9 out of 7, basically unchanged from 2011 and every intervening survey. Integration of customer information ranked even lower at 3.6% -- again almost unchanged from 3.5% in 2011.

Perhaps in line with these findings, CMOs aren’t hiring more personnel to handle social media, with the number of out-sourced employees devoted to social media remaining even at 2.1 between February and August of this year, and the number of in-house employees actually decreasing from 4.1 to 2.9 over the same period.

In the near term CMOs in general expect their budgets to increase by about 5.1% over the next twelve months, and the growth is due mostly to increased investments in digital media. On average marketing execs see total spending on digital media increasing 10.8% over the next year, while spending on traditional media is set to slip 3.6% over the same period.