Around 32% of businesses are yet to adopt a social media strategy for their marketing campaigns, according to the “Channel Vision – Version 2.0″ report by design and print firm Catalogues4Business (C4B), released earlier in August.
The firm interviewed more than 100 organisations in the UK, operating in various industry sectors with both business-to-business and business-to-consumer profile.
At present, digital marketing and social media are so widely used that the fact that some companies have not adopted them yet is quite surprising, said Ian Simpson, managing director at C4B. It is common sense to expect all businesses to be using social media within their marketing strategy, he added.
According to the report, 66% of companies use email marketing and 67% use social media as part of their marketing efforts. These figures have seen a dramatic increase compared to C4B’s 2012 report, when only half of businesses had deployed social media.
One in every five companies use photo social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest as a sales and marketing tool. This can be explained with the fact that social networks focused around photos allow users to see the products and services that a business offers, which works the same way as having a catalogue, Simpson said.
The report also found that around 50% of businesses adopting social media have a catalogue, while 82% of enterprises that rely on email marketing also have one.
Another important channel that needs consideration is a mobile-friendly website, as 39% of businesses’ webpages are not compatible with mobile devices. The majority of businesses do actually have a website, but around 50% of them do not use them as an e-commerce platform. Last but not least, 39% of companies make no search engine optimisation efforts at all.