Mobile marketing firms are asking if their ads are worth it

Businesses are struggling to see the direct return on their investment into social and smartphone advertising.

While businesses are spending a rising amount of money into mobile marketing and social media advertising strategies, the majority of them aren’t actually able to see all that much of a return on the investment they’ve been making, according to the results of a recently released study.

At the moment, companies are spending an average of 10.6 percent of their overall marketing budgets on mobile and social.

The percentage of the budget being dedicated to social and mobile marketing has been rising steadily, considering that it had been only 5.6 percent, back in 2009, according to a study from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association. It has been predicted that, by next year, investment into social media advertising will have risen to reach 13.2 percent of ad budgets, while it will have breached the 20.9 percent mark by the close of 2021.

Despite the fact that spending on social and mobile marketing is rising, the value is not yet being seen.

In fact, among the respondents in the recent Fuqua study, less than 12 percent were able to clearly measure the direct impact of the money they’d spent on mobile and social media advertising. That said, only 3 percent of the top firms in the marketing industry have said that social media has offered a high contribution to their overall performance.

According to professor Christine Moorman from Fuqua, who was also the director of the research, it is up to businesses to work their social media marketing strategies into the rest of their overall advertising efforts, so they are integrated more thoroughly. In a statement, she explained that “This will require changes to where social media is located, its involvement in the planning process, and consideration of how the firm’s customer and brand assets are managed in social media.”

The report indicated that there remain a large number of organizations that simply aren’t taking adequate steps in terms of the integration of all the customer data they are receiving. The average business gave itself a 3.4 rating out of a possible 7 points, when it came to its own integration of the customer data obtained at the time of purchase, as well as that gained through social media, mobile marketing and other communication channels.