Survey: Businesses pushing social

The 2012 Digital Optimizer Survey out from Lyris shows more brands making a change between search and social - namely that more time and energy is being spent on social because it's seen as having a higher return on investment (ROI) than search at this point. Other interesting findings include:

• Most respondents believe email holds the highest ROI, half say triggered emails and one-third say segmentation drive results
• Social ROI is beating SEO and SEM options
• 66% say they have a blog but only 22% say they see ROI from the blog

"Today's digital marketers face an increasingly complex customer interaction landscape. In order to succeed, marketers must be able to harness the power of data to connect with buyers in simple, meaningful ways," said Alex Lustberg, CMO of Lyris. "However, as we continue to evaluate marketing investments we have found that there is an increased need for best practices and analytics that can deliver the actionable insights to improve marketing effectiveness."

Although email is seen to have some of the best results for brands, they continue to lament subscriber bases and deliverability numbers. And, although social media - specifically Facebook - is seen has a positive impact on campaigns only about half are offering social sharing tools within their websites, ads and other content. Over the next year 51% say they'll increase Facebook spending.

And, for mobile, the future is indeed bright. Primarily because mobile adoption from advertisers has been slow. According to the report less than one-third use mobile tactics and only 21% say they design mobile version of email campaigns.

Tags: 2012 Digital Optimizer Survey, advertising trends, email marketing, lyris, social marketing