Social media and mobile head the digital agenda

Social media based features and social analytics are set to accelerate along with mobile commerce growth over the next year according to new research

Social media executions along with mobile initiatives and rich media tactics are among the top planned with more than 25 percent of digital marketing respondents planning to deploy features in these categories.

In Adobe Systems’ fifth annual global trends survey, businesses worldwide were asked to identify digital marketing deployed and planned tactics and their overall effectiveness across seven categories.

Digital marketers validated an ever-growing focus to further tap social media with an emphasis on social media analytics, which respondents cited as the top planned tactic (21 percent) and the third most deployed execution in the analytics category. Also, one out of three of the top planned initiatives and deployed executions are social-media based:

• Building branded social community pages – planned: 25 percent; deployed: 40 percent
• Advertising on social networking sites – planned: 25 percent; deployed: 22 percent

After years of hype and exploration, mobile is becoming a viable commerce channel as mobile commerce enablement showed the highest year-over-year change in effectiveness (+124 percent) and was one of the top five tactics with the highest year-over-year increase in deployment (+13 percent).  And, for businesses with more than $100 million in annual revenue, four out of the six most effective features were in the mobile category:

• Mobile advertising, promotions and bar-coded coupons to drive in-store or Web purchases (42 percent)
• Mobile product comparisons (41 percent)
• Address book integration for mobile (40 percent)
• Check inventory status on mobile devices, in-store or Web (40 percent)

In addition to social media and mobile initiatives, interactive catalogues stand out as a key tactic in 2011. They were cited as the overall top planned tactic across all categories (27 percent) as well as the top planned for mobile commerce visualisation (19 percent), and were ranked as the fourth most effective tactic overall.