“The State of Marketing 2010” Survey Results

Unica Corporation, a provider of marketing software solutions, announced results from its global survey of marketers, titled "The State of Marketing 2010." Results revealed a number of key findings on marketing challenges and bottlenecks, marketing technology adoption, and of course, new marketing channels.

Marketers highlight turning data into actions as one of their top issues and see IT as their number one technology bottleneck; contact optimization adoption will be the fastest growing marketing technology; and emerging channels like mobile, rich media, and social media are all being adopted with enthusiasm by marketers. Nearly half of marketers surveyed have already embraced social media marketing, and adoption is healthy across most social media outlets, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. However, marketers need to think more about integrating social media with other marketing tactics.

Mobile marketing continues its march toward greater significance. More than one third of marketers surveyed already conduct some type of mobile marketing. For marketers already embracing mobile, the richer interactivity of mobile web sites and mobile applications is proving to be an equal draw to text messaging.

Customer-initiated interactions (inbound marketing) provide an excellent opportunity to personalize marketing communications, and nearly three quarters leverage these interactions to serve marketing messages and offers. Customers who engage by their own choice and share information are much more receptive to offers. There is also notably more net expected usage of inbound marketing in call centers and on web sites than in physical stores.

The survey also highlights that many marketers use both aggregate web data and offline data when making decisions about marketing offers. This trend will likely continue to grow over the next twelve months (expected channel use ranging from 51%-92% for online data and 43%-81% for offline data). Interestingly, email is the channel where both online and offline data are most likely to be used in decision making -- it ties direct mail for offline use.

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