More budget will be allocated to social media activity than email for the first time, a study of 2011 travel marketing strategies has found.
The annual BigMouthMedia Online Travel Report found that - for the industry as a whole - the level of marketing spend on social media would account for 8% of total budget, edging ahead of email marketing with 7%.
Looking at individual sectors, only airlines marketers say email activity will continue to capture a bigger share of their budgets ahead of social media (10% vs 6%). Both online travel agencies and hotels say social media will grab 8% of spend, tour operators giving 6%.
The overall marketing spend mix for all sectors is as follows:
- Paid search - 36%
- SEO - 20%
- Display advertising - 16%
- Affiliate marketing - 10%
- Social media - 8%
- Email - 7%
Other notable data in the survey around the rise of social media as a marketing channel includes the resources used or people allocated to manage a company's activity:
- 1 person - 24%
- 2 persons - 8%
- 3 persons - 2%
- Non-dedicated resource - 37%
- No resource - 22%
- Agency - 7%
But perhaps rather worryingly, as many marketers (38%) say they do not measure the ROI of a campaign as those that do.
For those that do measure social media ROI, direct bookings came out on top as the most popular metric (30%), followed by fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter (25%), web traffic (20%), interactions and conversations (15%) and reviews added (5%).
NB: Full report and methodology (Tnooz assisted in the promotion of the survey) is available from BigMouthMedia.