62% of B2B Marketers to increase social media spend

A new survey provides a snapshot of current trends in B2B marketing tactics with a continued shift towards online in the ways in which marketing budgets and resources are spent.

While traditional online tactics – website, search and email rank highly amongst marketers, expectations for social media marketing are high with 62% of online B2B marketers planning to increase budgets in this area.

The research from BtoB magazine and featured in eMarketer this week reveals that more than two-thirds of those surveyed already use social media marketing tactics (as of December 2010), although their objectives varied.

The most popular use of social media marketing by far, was for brand building (80%). This was followed by ‘thought leadership’ (54%) – notably only 47% of respondents cited social media as a tactic for lead generation.

The findings are remarkably similar to the statistics released from MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

The report provides insight on increasing and decreasing marketing budgets and the impact on tactics. Information gathered from more than 1100 marketers surveyed, indicate that marketing strategies continue to evolve from outbound to inbound tactics.

Findings from the report again indicate website, search, social media and email as the four key areas of marketing investment.