â–¶ Latinos’ Loyalty Rests With Company Commitment: A survey by Garcia Trujillo LLC and Newslink Research finds that more than 66% of Latinos in the U.S. would be more inclined to buy products and services from companies that demonstrate a strong and visible commitment to the Hispanic community, and 64.7% would be even more loyal to those companies. Other study findings include:
• Although 59.3% of the consumers surveyed believe that the Hispanic market is important to companies and brands in the U.S., 42% believe U.S. companies have little respect for them as consumers.
• 94% want companies, products or brands in this country to have Spanish speaking spokespeople in their advertising PR campaigns.
• 15.5% would like to see products and services specifically created for the Latino consumer.
Source: Garcia Trujillo/Newslink Research
â–¶ Site Traffic Declines: A survey of U.S. and U.K. Web site owners finds that 24% had suffered large, unexplained falls in their site traffic. But only around 1 in 10 respondents to the survey conducted by One News Page were aware that unexplained falls in their site traffic could result from obscure penalties applied by search engines. Other findings include:
• Nearly 70% claim the search engines can “do whatever they like” when it came to imposing penalties; and nearly two-thirds of the site owners (64%) feel too dependent on the leading search engines.
• Well over half (57%) of those using paid search ads claim they have experienced unexplained increases to their bid costs. Most respondents (88%) say that paid search advertising costs lacks transparency.
• 94% of respondents are asking for the leading search engines to disclose any penalties to site owners.
Source: One News Page
â–¶ Facebook Not Used to Full Potential: Findings from a WongDoody study show that there are untapped opportunities for organizations to do more marketing on Facebook. The study investigated the activity of the Interbrand’s top 100 brands. While most brands have a Facebook listing, only 84 have corporate-run Facebook pages. Other findings include:
• While most brand pages offered new content nearly every day (average of 24 posts per month) and actively responded to consumer questions (66%), much of what brand marketers are electing to use is video content that has been repurposed from other sources.
• Companies are cautious about how much they allow fans to participate and are limiting engagement, with only 39% soliciting photo submissions; 33% promoting contests; 39% posting polls and quizzes for fun,; and 32% posting surveys to gain consumer feedback.
• The 84 official Facebook pages boasted an average of 1.8 million fans. In a single month, fans contributed on average 857 fan posts to each corporate wall.
Source: WongDoody
â–¶ Yet Locally.... Local merchants in the U.S. are gravitating toward simple, low-cost communications methods like social media (i.e. Facebook), search and e-mail marketing, says a new study by MerchantCircle. One reason why: More than half of local merchants are spending less than $2,500 a year on marketing, and 60% have no plans to raise their budgets this year. Other study findings include:
• Facebook continues to be a popular way for merchants to market their business, with 70% using the social network for marketing, up from 50% one year ago.
• Twitter has also grown in popularity over the past year, with nearly 40% of local merchants using the microblogging platform to build awareness and community around their products and services, up from 32% in Q4 2009.
• Less than 15% of merchants report doing any sort of mobile marketing, and more than half have no plans to do so in the coming months; 74% of merchants state that they don’t have a good idea of how to reach consumers via mobile marketing. PRN
Source: MerchantCircle