Social Media Spending Surges at Consulting Firms

Thought leadership marketing moves to social vehicles.

Consulting firms are ramping up spending on social media to drive thought-leadership marketing strategies, according to a research report by The Bloom Group, BlissPR and the Association of Management Consulting Firms, which carries implications for accounting firms.

The Effectiveness of Thought Leadership Marketing Activities (Click to enlarge)

Noting that firms’ “interest in social media appears to be matched only by their fears,” the authors offer six key findings:

1. Firms are quickly expanding their budgets for social media. While social media represented only an estimated 5% of the thought leadership marketing budget five years ago, spending has climbed rapidly in the last five years to an estimated 18% today. Five years from now, social media is projected to be about a third of that budget – about the same amount as consultancies will spend on offline and “traditional” online thought leadership marketing programs.

2. Social media will increasingly complement traditional thought leadership marketing channels. The two most effective thought leadership marketing activities are still “offline”: seminars run by consultancies and speeches they give at conferences organized by other parties. But company micro-sites or online communities, a relatively new social media channel, are close behind, ranked third in effectiveness (tied with search engine optimization.)

3. Other social media tools are gaining on traditional techniques. For instance, company pages on social networking sites and participation in third-party social networks both already surpass white paper syndication sites – an old staple of content marketing – in effectiveness.

4. Running out of content and determining how to use it as a marketing tool are the two biggest concerns about social media. The two biggest barriers to using social media in thought leadership campaigns are worries about regularly refreshing online content and determining how to best market it.

5. The firms with the most effective thought leadership marketing programs are much more likely to use research-based content, and they invest much more in social media than consulting firms with the least effective programs. The “leaders” of thought leadership marketing (firms generating more than 30 leads per month) are more than twice as likely as the “laggards” (firms generating 10 or less leads per month) to develop research-based content. In addition, the leaders dedicate three times the proportion of their budgets to social media than do the laggards. However, the leaders still apportion more than three-quarters (77%) of their budgets to offline and traditional online marketing.

via The Bloom Group