Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up
January 19th, 2010 | Published in Marketing News Round-up
One Third of U.S. Internet Users Now Post Status Updates
A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls “conversationalists” are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester’s data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.
It’s a simple formula: Recession requires more tactical spending. This year’s budget = + online spend + social activity + lead generation campaigns—brand investment. When the dollars get tight, spend shifts to more tangible, less expensive marketing programs with the promise of shorter-term returns (or at least lower costs). Not that there’s anything wrong with saving a few bucks wherever you can get the job done more efficiently. But when saving money becomes the goal instead of a guideline, something big always suffers—and it’s usually the brand.
While this is an important problem within the B2C community, it is absolutely URGENT within the B2B community. B2B marketers in large numbers have seen their marketing resources cut back dramatically for anything that isn’t expected to generate significant near-term flows of qualified sales leads. Why? Because absent good metrics to connect brand or longer-term asset development to actual financial value, these items were seen as strategic luxuries that could be postponed.
App Stores Are Big Business: $7 Billion in 2010
According to the analysts at research firm Gartner, mobile application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly $7 billion over the course of this year. That figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent purchasing the mobile applications themselves combined with an additional $0.6 billion generated through advertising revenues from in-app ads. Not surprisingly, Apple dominates this market, accounting for 99.4% of the market as of last year, states the report.
Over the course of 2009, mobile applications’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion with eight out of every ten apps downloaded offered free to end users, says Gartner. Going forward, the analysts predict mobile application stores’ revenue will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. That revenue, again, will be a combination of paid applications and free applications running ads
