By Christine Moorman and Koen Pauwels
Summary.
A bi-annual poll of U.S. marketing leaders found that social media investments have declined to their lowest level in seven years. An analysis of poll data suggests that lack of strategy fit, weak returns, and new competition from retail media may help explain this dip. Researchers leverage their findings to offer suggestions to marketers on how to overcome past strategy misalignment in order to continue to benefit from social media’s immediacy and pervasiveness, including through the use of Gen AI.
In June 2020, social media spending surged to 23% of marketing budgets when the pandemic forced consumers to stay home and marketers pivoted to digital channels for outreach. A new, heightened focus on social media accelerated the digitization of marketing so that by 2022, fully 57% of spending was dedicated to digital marketing. The recent adoption of new marketing technology (Martech) to automate processes and the use of AI to generate content have driven digitization further into business models.
