As American marketers choose to invest more of their budget in social media marketing and search engine optimization activities, a new eMarketer report highlights the accelerating downside for traditional advertising.
Is 2011 set to be the year of Facebook, even among search marketers? Based on what U.S. advertisers told search marketing agency Covario, it's definitely the year that social media and social networking is adopted by everyone -- including the prior market laggards.
Traditional advertisers that are also savvy about unpaid search results have discovered how social media marketing can help build their search engine optimization efforts.
Respondents to the Covario survey said their top priority for SEO next year was integration with social media programs.
Social media will also play an important part in paid search efforts next year. Search ad campaigns on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn were top of mind for nearly half of advertisers surveyed -- far ahead of priorities like local search or dealing with recent changes to major search engines.
The report noted that major spending increases on Facebook search advertising are planned for 2011. Covario estimated advertisers would be spending 10 to 20 percent of their pay-per-click budgets on Facebook next year, giving the social networking site a bigger share of that market.
The report also indicated that rather than pulling dollars away from other paid search spending areas, these would be additions to the search budget -- essentially taken from other parts of the budget instead.
The anticipated outcome: traditional advertising share of budget will decline further, as a result of the continued shift in budget priorities and greater emphasis on improving marketing's return on investment.