Sunday, November 29, 2009By Catherine O’Mahony
E-mail remains the top choice of online communication for the marketing industry, despite growing interest in social media and other online options.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) - the process by which brands ensure they come up first when a particular keyword is typed into a search engine - is the second most popular online activity.
Blogs and social networking come third. These are the results of an online marketing sentiment survey conducted by consultancy group Amas among 171 members of the Marketing Institute of Ireland.
Overall, the survey suggests that, while marketing managers are expanding their online portfolios, they are not necessarily scaling back on tried and tested options, such as email. Aileen O’Toole, managing director of Amas, said: ‘‘The survey shows online advertising has moved from the periphery to centre stage. With budgets squeezed, and increasing pressure on marketing departments to deliver tangible returns on whatever is spent, online is winning market share against traditional media.”
Participants were asked which online options they used to get their message out. Sixty-five per cent said they used e-mail, 48 per cent said SEO and 44 per cent said blogs or social networking. Only 25 per cent of respondents said they used audio/video (podcasts) to get their point across.
A full 37 per cent said they were using banner advertising. Nearly half of participants - 47 per cent - said they invested more than a tenth of their annual marketing budget online. This represented an increase from last year, when the figure was 30 per cent.
Almost 37 per cent of respondents said they had moved spend from direct mail to online marketing. ‘‘In Britain, the latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed online as the top advertising category, overtaking TV for the first time,” said O’Toole.
‘‘In Ireland, there’s still a gap, but that gap is starting to narrow. The upcoming launch of IAB in Ireland will help lift online’s market share, as will the general willingness by advertisers to spend because they’re getting good returns.”
