I say search-based marketers because the online survey of 500 professionals is primarily focused on readers of the two blogs, which tend to be search-oriented pros. That’s not to invalidate the data, but to simply establish some level of expectation of inherent bias in it. While certainly the survey takers likely include some broad-based marketers, CMOs and even integrated agency types, the core audience of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land are SEO pros. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

Knowing that, here are some takeaways from the report that I noted, keeping in mind my perspective is that of a broad-based, digital marketing strategy focus. Search, social, online media, email, apps … they’re all important in my tool box. While social may be my most robust area of focus, the others never fail to take some level of attention in what I typically recommend for clients.

Email is a Brand-Side Activity

When 86 percent of brand marketers, noted as “marketer/client” by the report, say they carry out email marketing and just 50 percent of agencies do, you can assume that brands are very protective of their email marketing programs. There are several reasons for this, but the fact that email marketing is still the most effective spend in the digital landscape (almost 2:1 in ROI according to the Direct Marketing Association) is likely chief among them.

Which leads to the question – As search or other digital avenues continue to prove their worth, will they, too, become more brand-side activities rather than agency led? Chances are good that will happen. Let’s see if the ROI value of Search and other areas continues to rise.

Yahoo! is Dead as a Search Engine

Yahoo! has transformed itself into a more broad-based web property under Marissa Mayer’s leadership and though it’s still heavily dependent upon search for revenue, search marketers have all but given up on it. Of those surveyed, when asked if they’re investing more or less in the various search engines, 60.2 percent said Yahoo! wasn’t relevant. And 44.9 percent said they’re investing less. I think it’s time to take the exclamation point off the logo, Yahoo.

Agencies Are in Love With Facebook Advertising

When asked which social advertising platforms are marketers using most, 58 percent of agency-side marketers said Facebook ads, compared to just 30.5 percent of brand-side marketers. In fact, brand marketers were more likely to use every other ad platform than their agency counterparts. Is this because brand marketers are experimenting more or perhaps casting wider social nets? Are agencies blinded by the power of Facebook or do they know something brand marketers don’t?

We’ll likely see these numbers level out as Twitter, LinkedIn and platforms like Instagram become more tested and stable, but if agencies don’t figure out how to not hitch their cart to one horse, brands may lose faith in them.

The Way Brands Pay Doesn’t Jive

The survey asked what the typical fee structure was like for brands paying digital partners. The answers were broken own over verticals of email, display, social media, paid social, paid search and SEO. A big, fat portion of brands say they pay on a fee per click basis (22 percent for social media, 18 percent for paid social). Yet, the corresponding number of agencies reporting being paid that was 1.2 percent for social and 4.2 percent for paid social.

Certainly, the brand-agency sample wasn’t 1:1 so the data isn’t a perfect match, but with a sample size of over 500, something doesn’t jive. Agencies say they mostly get paid with flat agency fees with anywhere from 28 to 41 percent reporting that structure in the various verticals. But marketers report only paying 13 to 23 percent that way. So something doesn’t fit.

From the agency side, I can tell you that brands paying a fee per click are

A) Undermining an agency’s value, and

B) Exposing themselves to fraudulent billing, as clicks can always be gamed.

Most brands don’t like paying percentage of media spend because that motivates the agency to just recommend spending more money. The flat agency fee seems to be the fairest approach to billing, so it will be interesting to watch those numbers over time to see if that grows.

The Bottom Line

Annual State of the Whatever reports are useful when you look at the results over time. Not much is changing really in the digital marketing space. We still have problems figuring out ROI and arguing for budget (which the survey also covers). We are seeing more spend on social media, especially in social advertising. But Search is still the dominant digital channel in terms of spend, even if email has proven to be more effective from an ROI standpoint.

I don’t know that I would say there’s much to fault about the study. It seems to parallel my experiences talking with clients and brands about their digital efforts. But there are certainly some interesting nuggets in there to ponder on.

You can see the entirety of the report at the SEMPO website.

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According to  Gartner’s Digital Marketing Spending survey report for 2014, digital or online advertising is the top spend category, taking up 12.2 percent of the surveyed CMO’s budgets. Website spend, digital commerce, social marketing, mobile marketing and content creation and management are the next five categories. Coming in a distant seventh is search marketing, according to the results found in Gartner’s Reflecting Focus on Customer Experience report.

SEO and SEM make up just 9.2 percent of the typical marketing spend according to this survey. That number is down from the year before, which was a number down from the year before that.

Certainly, I understand that content, social, mobile and so forth require more of an investment when they’re new to a company’s budget. But how on earth can CMOs justify spending less than 10 percent of their digital budget on the one category that was, is and will always be the most important for their brands?

That’s right. You just heard a social media guy say that search is the most important category of a digital marketing budget. Why? It’s simple:

Search engine optimization and marketing make up the one category for your digital spend that serves an audience ready and willing to buy.

When someone encounters an advertisement online, they may be shopping for said product or they may not. If that online media is appearing on a news or social media site, there’s an almost 100 percent chance the audience is not shopping. They’re reading the news or posting selfies.

When someone encounters a company’s social media posts or content marketing efforts, they’re almost 100 percent not looking for information about or solutions to a particular problem. They’re probably looking at pictures of their grandkids … or their ex.

But when someone encounters your paid search advertisement or sees a page featuring the organic results you’ve worked hard to produce, they are different than all other digital audiences. They typed in a keyword, question or problem to which your ranked content is a potential solution. They went looking for you!

SEO Isn’t Optional

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are not just nice-to-haves or pieces of a larger digital strategy you don’t have to worry about much because you did it a few years ago and satisfactorily rank for most of the things you wish to rank for. It is an imperative segment of digital marketing which you cannot afford to lose focus of.

Whether you’re working hard on it internally, or you have the budget and interest to bring in outside consultants or agencies to help, search engine spend should be the first and most carefully handled piece of your digital strategy. It shouldn’t be treated like low-hanging fruit that’s easy to nab. It should be treated like something that serves your most important prospective customers.

Because, after all, the willing ones are more important.

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@JasonFalls As a speaker and social media expert, what do you think about the idea that social media doesn’t truly utilize face-to-face?

— Jacob Markiewicz (@JacobMarkiewicz) July 30, 2014

The ensuing conversation was great food for thought. My response was that social media wasn’t really supposed to. Flippant, yes, but the point was that social media – that which leverages online networks at least – is limited to people with faces in devices. Thus, by definition, they can’t be face-to-face.

That teed Jacob up nicely to show me how it could with a neat, Android-only (for now) video app called Movy, so I stepped right in his trap. But the discussion is certainly one for marketers to consider.

Using the Internet To Get People Off of the Internet

Face-to-face, or more specifically, offline, in-real-life interactions are infinitely more powerful than any we can have online. It is my position, then, that the truly successful online marketing efforts are those that move people offline to interact with the brand or its community.

Fiskars was one of the first true social media success stories, but it wasn’t really. It was a word-of-mouth case study. The scissor company built a private, online social network for its fans and customers. That community facilitated offline meetings and scrapbooking sessions and product recommendations in real life, as well as in the fake (er … Internet) one. (Sadly, they killed the program and site last year.)

Merriam-Webster defines the word “social” as “relating to or involving activities in which people spend time talking to each other or doing enjoyable things with each other.” Oreo’s Super Bowl and real-time marketing experience isn’t a social experience because people retweet and like its posts on social networks. It’s a social experience because people turn to a co-worker and say, “Hey! Did you see this?”

The Concept of Convergence

Working with Elasticity, my team at CafePress and I have circled around the concept of convergence. Andy Barnett is largely responsible for it. Convergence happens when your strong content is distributed through social channels and amplified by your public relations to produce strong search engine optimization for your brand and that content.

But the resulting organic SEO lift isn’t the only benefit. The true social benefit of convergence is when an audience member turns to someone else and says, “Hey! Did you see this?”

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has long reported that this type of marketing is 62 times more powerful than a basic advertisement. It’s more powerful than online shared content, too. So if we truly wish to optimize our content, we’ll create with the intent to produce an offline effect.

A perfectly-written viral post on social media isn’t genuinely social until it provokes authentic human interaction in real life – be it convergence, a purchase or your co-worker tapping you on the shoulder to ask, “Hey! Did you see this?”

That’s what makes your marketing truly social.

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