Which web marketing performs best: email or social media like Twitter?

Published 11 Dec 09

No business (even a huge corporate) has the resource or budget to do every marketing initiaive well

When I was Head of Advertising at Asda, I had an advertising budget of more than £60M in today's money. It sounds a lot, but Tesco and Sainsburys spent more. Whether your marketing budget is £5,000 or £60M, it is likely that you will have a competitor with a bigger budget. It's not how much you spend that counts but how you choose to allocate your budget and resource. Marketing Return on Investment (ROI) is about choosing activities that provide the best return for every £ spent.

Should you invest your time and money in pricing, promotion, packaging or point of sale? Should you invest in advertising, direct marketing or PR? Within advertising should you invest in press, or directories or magazines or radio or tv or internet marketing? With web marketing should you invest in SEO, email or Twitter?

You could try everything and discover what works for you after 2 - 20 years depending on your budget but I wouldn't recommend doing this.

In a recent survey, over 80 senior marketers were asked which web marketing channels delivered the best results?

11% said they didn't know which channel performed best. Although this may sound shocking to some, I suspect that given the survey respondents were experienced web marketers, the real percentage of companies who don't know which web marketing performs best would be significantly higher than 11%.

Newer, social marketing / networking initiatives like Facebook and Twitter was considered best by 11% just behind display advertising on 14%. No one rated mobile advertising best.

Email was considered best by 23% of respondents with search (covering KeyWord research, PPC and SEO) ranked top with 33%.

In a similar survey, over 100 senior marketers were asked which digital marketing media was most effective?

Once again, mobile marketing was placed last with just 5% saying it was effective or very effective. However, only 30% of respondents had tried mobile marketing, which was the lowest participation of the 13 channels tested.

Blogging was tried by 35% of respondents and 33% of respondents said it was effective or very effective.

Online communities like Facebook, Twitter had been tried by 70% of respondents (which confirms this was a 'pro-web sample' of people which I suspect is much higher than average) and rated effective or very effective by 33% of respondents.

Paid search (PPC) had been tried by 80% of respondents and rated effective / very effective by 58%.

Search engine optimisation had been tried by 95% of respondents and 70% rated it effective or very effective

Email marketing ranked top with 98% of companies having tried it and 78% rating it as effective or very effective.

Key learning for companies big or small

• Most big corporates have switched a significant amount of marketing budget and resource from traditional activities to web marketing because it is more cost-effective and accountable
• Senior marketers consistently report that email, PPC & SEO are the most effective web marketing channels
• These channels can be successfully implemented by companies big and small: internal resource and budget are no longer barriers to entry. Knowledge is the key barrier so contact a web marketing expert
• Focus 80-90% of your time and budget on what works
• Use web analytics to identify what's working and what isn't
• Consider allocating 10-20% of your marketing budget and time on testing new marketing initiatives. It might be that Facebook or Twitter work for you.
• But don't test more that 1 or 2 things at a time. If the tests work, add them to your marketing mix and consider testing something else

Remember web marketing is about solving customer's problems profitably.

Research carried out by Omniture & Sapient Interactive in May / June 09

Added by: peterh

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