MARKETINGSHERPA — I’ve been digging through MarketingSherpa’s new 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report: SEO Edition and finding very interesting data describing social media’s impact on SEO performance. The most interested stat I came across noted that marketers working in social media reported an average 27% conversion rate for organic search traffic. Those not working in social media reported 17%. That is a 58.8% difference -- which is huge. What could cause this disparity? Possible explanations are found in a second chart. Marketers were asked whether social media or SEO were effective marketing tactics for achieving a list of objectives...

MARKETINGSHERPA — If you’re still on the fence about the importance of a company blog, consider this trend: Many B2B marketers report that their team’s blog -- not the company homepage -- is now the most popular entry point for online visitors. Thanks to a solid blogging strategy and the inherent SEO benefits of blog content, these marketers reported that their blogs were now outpacing their company homepages for key metrics such as: Total visits, Time spent on site and Number of pages viewed. For example, the team from the ESP Delivra reported that their company blog and social networking activity have become the primary ways they get thought-leadership content in front of prospects...

MARKETINGSHERPA — As social media’s use for marketing purposes grows, we want to know how many companies are outsourcing different social marketing responsibilities, including content creation and strategic planning. This week’s chart reveals what percentages of our respondents are outsourcing different social marketing responsibilities...

Few organizations are outsourcing social marketing responsibilities

MARKETINGSHERPA — In order to determine how social media was being perceived by organizations at budget time, we asked more than 2,300 marketers to give us their input. Take a look at this week’s chart to see how many organizations are increasing their social media budgets...

How organizations perceive social media marketing at budget time

MARKETINGSHERPA — Summary: We wanted to find out the effectiveness of social media in terms of achieving various target business objectives, such as increasing brand or product awareness and increasing sales revenue. See the responses we received from more than 2,000 marketers in this week’s chart...

Rating the Effectiveness of Social Media in Terms of Objectives Achieved