Survey reveals SEO top priority for marketing yet admit more time spent on Email

October 31, 2007

Results from a survey carried out Coremetrics today reported that most marketing professionals regard Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as their top priority yet they admit that more time spent on Email marketing.

While most marketers recognise the benefit of SEO and are eager to participate, very few have budgets that are in line with that objective.

Search Engine Optimisation was ranked as the number one priority over nine other choices, including email campaigns and online analytics, but ranked only fourth in terms of both time and budget allocation

Email campaigns continue to demand most of a marketer’s time (22% on average), while the biggest portion of budgets (33% on average) go to online advertising. This is despite the fact that SEO was consistently ranked as the #1 priority

Online promotion design and implementation was ranked as relatively unimportant, (#5 of 9) but comes in third in terms of both time and budget allocation, ahead of SEO, online campaign analytics and email marketing programs, among others.

Other statistics pulled from the report were:
– 58% of respondents have implemented user generated content or reviews in the past year
– 31% of respondents have implemented a blog in the past year
– 25% of respondents have implemented an RSS feed in the past year

The findings also concluded that most of the marketers interviewed planned to implement a social media marketing (SMM) campaign at some point, with most admiting that they were likely to run one in the next twelve months.

Of the marketers that had started some SMM work; they had broken down like so -

• 50% of respondents plan to implement user generated content or reviews
• 22% of respondents plan to implement a blog
• 20% intend to implement social networks, and another 20% plan to implement an RSS feed

“This study echoes many of the qualitative findings that we hear from our customers on a day to day basis — marketers are aware of the impact that social media marketing can have on their overall program, but view it as uncharted territory, not worthy of their budget,” said John Squire, SVP product strategy, GM marketing services at Coremetrics.

Author:  www.hitsearchlimited.com
Source:  http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/99998/

«