We also learned that 61% of respondents planned to increase their focus on email marketing in 2012 (top choice), while 53% intended to increase social advertising (second choice). It will be interesting to see how marketers feel about their 2013 marketing programs, though I’m guessing that multi-channel will remain a top challenge.

Please take our survey on your company’s focus from a marketing perspective, including topics like online and offline customer experience, marketing department integration and more. It will only take a couple of minutes to weigh in and we’ll send you the results so that you can see where you benchmark against other organizations.

• 67% planned to leverage social media more during the 2011 holiday season than the year before
• Multi-channel coordination was a big challenge for 46% of marketers
• 85% were at least taking about, if not already using, mobile marketing for the 2011 holiday season

The positive feedback prompted us to take a closer look specifically at holiday marketing strategies, and we’d like to hear what you’re planning. In this year’s survey we’d like to learn how successful those social media campaigns were last season, and how investment will change for 2012. We’re also asking about plans to invest in newer tactics like Pinterest boards and real time triggered messaging.

The findings of this research will provide a benchmark to see what other marketers are doing and how their plans compare to your own. So please take this nine question survey – the more participants, the more meaningful a benchmark we’ll be able to share with you in the upcoming months.

I remember growing up as a kid in rural Massachusetts thinking about how “back-to-school” TV ads were so irritating. Back-to-school? In July? I’m not even half way through my summer vacation! Little did I know back then that marketers like to get an early start to the back-to-school sales season by planting seeds with their target audience and hoping those seeds grow into a healthy crop of new customers. This remains true today and planting season starts even earlier.

The back-to-school sales season represents a huge opportunity for marketers. Here are some facts and figures that help quantify the size of the market:

• According to the National Retail Federation, consumers will spend approximately $70 billion on back-to-school merchandise. About $23 billion of this is spending by parents of children in kindergarten through 12^th grade. The remainder represents spending by students starting or returning to college. All told, the back-to-school season is the second largest consumer spending event for retailers outside of the winter holidays.
• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this year there will be over 55 million students enrolled in schools from pre-kindergarten through high school. About 56% of these students are in grades one through eight, 28% are in high school and 15% are enrolled in preschool or kindergarten.
• About one-third of households contain children under age 18. That translates to roughly 38 million households. The vast majority of these contain school-age children.
• The back-to-school season is not just about reaching kids in elementary school, middle school, junior high school and high school. Another 20 million students are expected to be attending college. That’s a huge opportunity to sell things like dorm room furnishings, electronic gadgets and computers, just to name a few.

With every marketing opportunity come certain marketing challenges. It’s never easy. Marketers of back-to-school products face their own set of challenges when vying for the attention of parents of school-age children. Here are some specific examples:

• Who are my key targets and how can I differentiate my marketing message?

Targeting a market that includes a vast array of families with contrasting attitudes, opinions, motivations, lifestyles and shopping behaviors is incredibly challenging. Not all of these families are working from the same shopping list. And not all of these families will respond to the same marketing message. Segmenting your market into finer target audiences is highly recommended.

• How should my marketing budget be allocated across multiple online and offline channels?

You have multiple sales and marketing channels to consider. You don’t want to build a marketing plan without a well-defined strategy for reaching your best targets. For instance, moms have a greater propensity to have a smartphone compared to the overall adult population. Thus, marketers should then be thinking about integrating mobile applications into their overall strategy.

• What can I do to make my message stand out above the crowd?

Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. I’m sure some of you are parents with children in school or in college. It’s a very crowded and cluttered back-to-school marketplace with many, many retailers clamoring for attention. One idea for standing above the crowd is to start by identifying your existing customers who are most likely to have families with children. Then send them an email early in the summer with suggestions for fun things to do this summer season. This can be followed up later with an email campaign containing some tips about getting ready for back-to-school. The key is to grab their attention and start engaging early.

• What variety of offers and promotions will enable me to capture a significant share of back-to-school expenditures?

To capture your fair share of the back-to-school market you’ll need to develop offers and promotions that are both enticing and relevant. This requires learning as much as you can about your prospects and what motivates them to buy.

For instance, a typical mom with elementary school-age children might enter the back-to-school season with the following thoughts:

“I want to buy him the cool gear to go back to school with: new clothes, shoes, backpack and lunch box. And I don’t mind, I actually LOVE back to school shopping.”*

That mom may quickly respond to your marketing message. Or, you could have a mom with these thoughts:

“I’m not upper class – we’re in the lower/middle income bracket and money is tight for us. I budget for school expenses as I would anything else…and I won’t have my son miss out because ‘we can’t afford’ something… I’d give up something else first.”*

She loves shopping for back-to-school, she has budget limitations, and she’s willing to make certain adjustments to her budget with the best interests of her child in mind. If you knew what she was most likely to be thinking, do you think it would influence the messaging and offers you would use to attract her? Well, of course. Attitudes shape shopping behavior.

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Watch our recent webinar about planning your back-to-school marketing campaigns in style. And stay tuned for part two of my blog series on the topic in a few days.

*Feedback was compiled from PHD in Parenting: http://www.phdinparenting.com/2011/08/22/who-should-pay-for-school-supplies/

We hope you’ll join our webinar this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. EST to hear what every digital marketer needs to know about channels, benchmarks and trends, and what we call the New American Consumer – check out the tidbits below from page 11 of the report. Insights like these will be put into perspective and practical advice for how to leverage these insights will be dispensed!

• Twenty-eight percent of marketers noted that creating effective targeting profiles was one of their biggest marketing challenges last year.
• An increasing percentage of college graduates are returning home to live with their parents.
• Households that contain adults and children from multiple generations are a mega-trend.
• A study by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) found that in 2006, one out of 12 first births was to women age 35 and older.

Register for The 2012 Digital Marketer webinar: Powerful insight for today’s digital-savvy marketer.

Software for the Hard Stuff

Long gone are the days of preparing our taxes the old-fashioned way using pen and paper (and hopefully a calculator). Last year, just 8.7% of U.S. tax filers prepared their taxes manually, down from 16.4% of filers who prepared their taxes this way in 2006. Software (including both online and offline versions, such as Turbo Tax or H&R Block At Home) have risen to replace their graphite-powered ancestors. In 2005, 21.5% of tax filers said they used software to prepare their taxes. Specifically, 6.8% used offline software and another 14.7% used online software. Today, 21.5% of filers use online tax software and 7.4% use offline software, bringing the total share of software preparers to 28.9%.

But tax software isn’t just replacing at-home pencil pushers. The share of filers using a CPA, a private accountant or a notary public to prepare their taxes has also declined slightly in recent years as has the share of filers that use a professional on-site service, like H&R Block of Jackson Hewitt. In 2011, 30.8% of filers had their taxes prepared by a CPA, private accountant or notary, down from 32.9% who employed this type of professional in 2006. Likewise, 17.7% of last year’s filers used a professional on-site service to prepare their taxes, compared with 19% who used such a service in 2006.

Filing Trends of Business Owners

Much attention in Washington has been paid to small business owners, especially when the topic of tax policy is concerned. Rest assured, we’re not going to explore the political implications of proposed tax code changes on business owners, but we will examine the way these Americans prepare their personal taxes.

A business owner’s tax prep work depends a lot on how many employees they have working for them. Those who own very small companies with between 2 and 9 employees, including the owner, are the most likely to have a CPA, private accountant or notary prepare their taxes. In fact, 65% of these small business owners do their taxes this way, compared with 52% of those who own companies with between 10 and 99 employees. Interestingly, only 35% of tax filers who own companies with 100 employees or more use a CPA, a private accountant or a notary to prepare their taxes, a rate equal to that of the national average. Larger business owners are actually more likely than average to have their taxes done by an on-site professional.

While few business owners do their taxed by hand, the self-employed who have no employees are actually among the few that still do their taxes the old-fashioned way. In fact, 11% of business owners who list only themselves as employees say they did their taxes manually last year, a rate 30% above than the U.S. average. Most of those who don’t to their taxes themselves have them done by a CPA, a private accountant or a notary. Fifty-two percent of the self-employed with no other employees chose this method to prepare their taxes last year, which is a rate 45% higher than the average filer.

Deduction Time

Deductions are a common way for reducing one’s tax liability. Here we’ll explore how many Americans could benefit from several common deductions allowed by the Internal Revenue Service.

For more information about consumer trends, visit www.experian.com/simmons.

Here are several stats from the report that I find especially compelling; many more are contained in the report:

• 91% of today’s online adults use social media regularly
• Revenue per email averages 2x higher for ‘Friends and Family’ campaigns
• 28% of smartphone owners watch video on their phone in a typical month
• Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter

I hope you’ll sign up for The 2012 Digital Marketer Webinar being held on Thursday, April 19th at 1:00 PM EST. Two of our resident data experts, Bill Tancer (best-selling author of Click) and John Fetto, will explore the latest insight, trends and tips to keep you marketing forward throughout 2012 and beyond.

Keep an eye on this blog for more updates from The 2012 Digital Marketer report, including informative videos from Experian Marketing Services subject matter experts.

Americans are again embracing the concept of multigenerational family living. Whether it’s the outcome of a failing economy or other economic and sociological factors, households that contain adults and children from multiple generations are a mega-trend.

The demographic developments are undeniable. An expanding elderly population has begun moving in with their adult children with greater frequency. At the same time, these adult children could be parents of young adults themselves who, for a variety of reasons, have decided to move back home. In both cases, younger children under age 18 also might be present in the home.

One example of this marketplace trend is the emergence of the segment called Sports Utility Families. Defining characteristics of this segment include the following:

• About 59% of Sports Utility Families have four or more persons living in the household.
• They are extremely family centered. Fully 80% of Sports Utility Families have childrenunder age 18. They have a high incidence of children across all age ranges and are 4.1 times more likely than U.S. householders overall to be caring for teenage children.
• Although they earn upscale incomes, they do not feel financially secure; they worry about the future and wish money were less important in their lives.
• They make a high percentage of online and catalog purchases in outdoor, home office, pets, toys, travel and home décor categories.

Marketing to Sports Utility Families and other types of multigenerational households can be complicated. In many cases, there is no single primary decision maker in the home. Purchase decisions are likely to be shared and influenced by multiple family members. Marketers need to carefully craft their communications when an elderly parent, a young adult or other minors are all sharing the same living space. For example, a household that might initially look like a traditional family with preschool children can easily be overlooked when targeting seniors with a healthcare-related offer. Knowing that this “traditional family” also contains an aged parent dramatically changes the picture.

For more on the New American Consumer pre-order the 2012 Digital Marketer report, set to release in April, and check our blog weekly for ongoing insights.

On average, advertisers will spend over $1 million for a 30-second spot aired during the men’s tournament championship game.

Because the event is stretched out over a three-week long period and reaches a relatively affluent consumer base, the tournament has broad appeal to advertisers. While perhaps not as impactful as a single sporting event with a much larger audience, such as the Super Bowl, advertisers can still benefit by delivering their message to a healthy-size audience with increased frequency. Based on an analysis of television viewership data tracked by Experian Simmons, the men’s tournament will reach nearly 20% of adults age 18 or over. That’s counting all games over the full length of the tournament.

Several national advertisers targeting men’s tourney viewers can expect to reach a large percentage of their brand users. In fact, the five advertisers with the greatest brand penetration among likely men’s tournament viewers include Coca-Cola (65%), AT&T (50%), Ford (24%), LG (21%) and Honda (15%).

But it isn’t necessarily the biggest brands that reap the greatest reward from advertising during an event with the staying power of March Madness and the NCAA basketball tournament. This is one conclusion from an analysis based on Experian’s Ad Relevancy Score. The score is an estimate of how closely a targeted audience that is exposed to an ad (in this case, the audience that is likely to be viewing the men’s tournament) matches up against the profile of a brand’s existing customer base. A high score indicates that the audience is a strong match and good fit for the brand. In other words, the ad should be particularly relevant to those who are viewing. A low score indicates that the ad could be less relevant because the targeted audience misses the mark relative to the characteristics of the brand’s most likely users. The average Experian Ad Relevancy Score for a brand is set at 100.

When ranking brands based on an analysis of the Experian Ad Relevancy Score for the men’s basketball tournament, we narrowed the advertiser field down to an Elite Eight. Five of the top eight scores are for automotive-related brands. The qualifying brands and their associated scores are as follows:

Response attribution

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers in today’s complex multi-channel world is determining which marketing programs are generating the biggest returns and which initiatives are not performing. Being successful requires a holistic and integrated approach to response attribution ¾ one that is based on a sound strategy and effective execution based on the company’s level of marketing sophistication.

Developing a strategy

Marketers need to think of three key things when contemplating response attribution and marketing cross-channel analysis:

1. Measure the ecosystem, not the event. Today’s complex marketing environment means that by nature, a customer or a prospect receives multiple marketing touches during the purchase cycle. Attributing 100% of a response, or a purchase, to a single event does not tell the whole story. Measure the entire series of events that drove that customer to purchase, not just the last touch.
2. Execute holdout tests. In order to truly understand the impact of withholding a marketing channel, marketers need to measure the lift that the channel provides to the marketing ecosystem. Do hold-outs and control groups consistently to make a properly informed decision.
3. Don’t listen to the pundits. Every company’s data is unique. There are tons of technorati, digerati and social media elite that depict a particular marketing channel as dead or dying and being replaced by another. That statement is only true if the data says it is true. Listen to the customer and how he or she interacts with your brand, and then make an informed decision.

Pre-order The 2012 Digital Marketer report and be one of the first to receive it this April. In it we’ll continue the response attribution conversation including how to effectively execute the strategy.