Frugal Marketers Look at Social Media Friends to Make up for Reduced Headcount and Budgets

Oct. 8, 2009 - PRLog -- 8th Oct’ 09, San Francisco, CA: NextBee media, today, released the results of 2009 holiday marketing survey. With an enthusiastic response from marketers for the survey, NextBee managed to gain some constructive data which is aimed at helping eCommerce merchants and organizations with their marketing plan for the 2009 holiday season.

The survey data shows that almost 70% businesses are banking heavily on Social media to get better traction for their products and services. With social media as a driving force for better engagement with customers, even Customer Rewards/Loyalty Programs are seen as more and more effective and reliable marketing channel. You can read the detailed report here (http://blog.nextbee.com/2009/10/social-media-marketing-shows-biggest.html)

From Sept 7th to Sept 30th NextBee Media conducted an open survey of marketing professionals. The survey questionnaire (http://blog.nextbee.com/2009/09/2009-holiday-season-marketing.html) was based on response scale, semantic differential, and Guttman scale. These questions were mainly about last year’s holiday season, how the businesses faired, and the expectations that businesses have for the coming holiday season. With active collaboration with popular marketing professional hubs such as LinkedIn, Digital Marketing, eMarketing Association Network, and Word of Mouth, survey gathered the required sample set to make statistically viable conclusions.

The survey managed to make out some important information about the changes in the marketing strategies that businesses are planning to adopt during this holiday season. Most striking was that the presence, type, and size of a business or number employees in a marketing team did not vary the trends that much. Businesses of all size and industry sectors were found to be on the same page.

The key findings from the survey are –

•   Businesses are planning on big gains in resource investment towards Social Media Marketing and Customer Reward Programs.

•   Sales forecasts for this year are at the same levels with revenue figures from last year.

•   Businesses of all types and industry sectors have very similar outlook towards the coming holiday season. So it does seem that the luxury and discretionary purchases are expected to make come back this year.

•   Given, NextBee Media's (http://www.nextbee.com) focus on providing tools and services to merchants for Social Media Marketing, opinions of marketers were of key interest to us. The survey results show that 61% of the businesses are planning to concentrate more on Social Media. On the other hand only 8% want to reduce their efforts.

•   Email marketing, SEO, SEM, and display ads being the fundamentals of online marketing, the survey saw a dominating percentage (66%) of businesses deciding to keep it at similar levels. While 18% plan to increase their resources in the same respect and 16% want to drop it. It is consistent with no big developments in these fields this year.

•   While, mobile marketing, a lesser explored and comparatively newer marketing area has seen some mixed reactions. 55% businesses decide to keep the campaign at a similar level, 20% businesses plan to increase their efforts, and 7% say that they will be dropping their campaign to something lower in scale.

•   Word of mouth marketing techniques that rely on vocal customer engagement and support for brands such as Reward/Loyalty/Referral Coupon Promotions are also seeing increasing interest from marketers. The results show that 68% of the total participants will be opting for experiments in this area and are open to trying out new ideas while only 6% will reduce it.

From special notes entered by some of the participants the channel that saw reduced interest among different online marketing channels is the Affiliate Marketing. But overall all channels of online marketing are getting more and more resources at the cost of traditional Print/Radio/TV Advertising mediums for over 90% of all survey participants.

"These results substantiate the anecdotal assumptions held by many in the industry and the ones we heard from many merchants listed in our directory (http://rewards.nextbee.com) that social media marketing will be a channel that everyone reckons starting with 2009 Holiday season.", says Ruchali Parve, Founder and VP of Marketing NextBee Media. She further adds, "We hope that the whole marketing community finds the responses and findings of this survey relevant and useful."


About NextBee Media
NextBee Media (http://www.nextbee.com) delivers first software as a service solution to manage variety of online promotional campaigns from referral rewards to loyalty points and from sweepstakes to cash back or charity donation campaigns. Apart from its flagship product focused on buzz marketing, NextBee maintains active engagement with larger eCommerce community with its Reward Programs Directory (http://rewards.nextbee.com) and a frequently updated blog (http://blog.nextbee.com) that tracks buzz marketing and viral marketing ideas from an online marketer's perspective.

Please contact press at nextbee dot com to arrange an interview, graphics and/or for additional quotes.

Contact Information:
Prashant Mohole
Phone: 650-641-0890
Email: press at nextbee dot com

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About NextBee Media
A team of seasoned entrepreneurs have developed first software as a service platform to enable businesses setup and manage successful promotions such as referral reward programs on their website.Get details at http://www.nextbee.com