Survey: 70% Of Marketers Plan To Boost Social Spending In 2015

A large majority of marketers plan to increase their spending on social media marketing — both paid and organic — in 2015, according to a new survey.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud polled 5,035 global marketing professionals about their budgetary plans for digital marketing and found that 70% plan to boost spending on social media advertising this year. The same percentage plan to spend more on social media marketing overall and 67% will spend more on social engagement.

Those were the top three results in marketers’ priority chart in the 2015 State of Marketing report, which was released today.

Social engagement spending tied with location-based mobile tracking for third. Here’s the chart:

Click to enlarge

Source: Salesforce (2015)

As you can see, the chart is top heavy for social and mobile. Salesforce reported that 84% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their overall digital spending. Mobile and social are leading the way because 70% believe mobile is a “critical enabler of products and services” and 64% believe the same about social. That’s a 13 percentage point jump for mobile over Salesforce’s 2014 report and a giant 39 point leap for social.

Further evidence of the increased emphasis on social: 71% of marketers agree that social marketing is core to their business and nearly twice as many marketers over 2014 say social is a primary revenue source. Also sixty-six percent of marketers have a dedicated team to manage their social efforts, up 9 percentage points from Salesforce’s 2014 survey.

Facebook continues to be favored social channel for marketers with 80% using the social network and 73% believing in its effectiveness. Twitter (70% use, 68% vouching for its effectiveness), LinkedIn (62%, 69%), Google+ (56%, 69%) and YouTube (56%, 68%) were the only other social networks used by more than half of the respondents.

Source: Salesforce (2015)

You can download the full study here.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor.