Today social media marketing has crossed the stage of experimentation and evolved into a serious part of the company internet marketing campaign. Integration of social media with the overall marketing mix is essential for marketing efficiency, but marketers are yet to achieve seamless integration between these two.
Unica, a marketing software solutions company, conducted a survey to asses the level of integration of social media marketing tactics with the overall marketing mix. The results indicate that sharing social media links through web and email offers the best integration.
According to the survey, which included marketers from North America and Europe, social sharing links in web and email was run as part of integrated campaign by 62% of the respondents. Other tactics run as a part of integrated campaign were widgets or applications on third party social sites (55%), social media ads (54%), location based games (51%), user generated content or product reviews and pages on third party social sites (48%), blogs (46%), company hosted online communities (43%) and microblogging (42%).
Marketers still need to overcome many barriers for complete marketing integration. Cross channel campaigns are a big challenge, and tactical integration of social media and mobile with traditional marketing methods still has a long way to go.
Integration of mobile marketing tactics with the traditional media presents a similar picture. Once again email came up as the best integrated tool. The survey results indicate that 64% marketers run mobile version of email as part of integrated campaigns. Other mobile marketing tactics run as part of integrated campaigns include mobile messaging (57%), location based targeting (55%), mobile version of website (52%), mobile ads (49%) and mobile applications (40%).