06
2009
Retailers Turn to Social Media in Face of Downturn
A piece of research published this week by Forrester and Shop.org about the mix of online marketing tactics retailers plan to use this year caught my eye. How does actual consumer behavior compare with how marketers plan to allocate budgets?
The following chart shows the online marketing mix for our Retail 500 Index, a custom category of 500 leading retail websites.
The Forrester/Shop.org research found that retailers plan to scale back on expensive search marketing campaigns while expanding efforts on social media such as blogs and social networks. As the above chart illustrates, social networks account for a relatively small share of traffic to websites in the Retail 500 Index, at 4.9% in April 2009. By contrast, Search Engines accounted for 30.9% of upstream visits, 23.9% of which was paid traffic.
In terms of how things have changed in the past year, the following chart shows the percentage change in upstream visits to Retail 500 websites year over year in April.
As illustrated, the biggest positive change was for Blogs and Personal Websites, a category cited specifically by the Forrester/Shop.org research as a growth area for retailers. The change indicated in the chart is however from a low base. Blogs and Personal Websites accounted for only 0.28% of upstream visits to Retail 500 websites in April 2009.
News and Media accounted for only 1.82% of upstream visits but also showed large gains year over year. This indicates that opportunities exist in more traditional advertising channels as well.
More companies are moving away from traditional marketing towards internet network marketing because of the reduced costs compared to expensive television, radio and newspaper ads. Today’s consumers want personal interactions with those they do business with before they make a buying decision. The combination of internet network marketing and social media is a perfect internet network marketing lead generation tactic to establish your presence in a number of different places on the Web and reach potential customers anywhere in the world. Traditional marketing will never be able to target as precisely as social media marketing. Just imagine the social media profits you can have in being able to recruit people from different places.