Businesses will invest more in email marketing and social media marketing in 2010

Email marketing service provider (ESP) StrongMail recently released its “2010 Marketing Trends Survey”. The poll found that the majority of the surveyed businesses plan to increase marketing spend in email marketing and social media in 2010, making them the top two areas of investment for next year.

There is also good news for the marketing industry since the survey found that 89 percent of respondents plan to increase or maintain budgets next year.

Furthermore it seems that there is a growing confidence in the US since half of polled businesses expects their customers to spend more in 2010 and nearly a quarter more expect them to spend the same.

StrongMail also found that 48 percent of businesses are increasing overall marketing budgets in 2010.

As we said investments in email and social media marketing are the main areas of investment for next year: 69% of the surveyed businesses plan to invest more in email marketing and 59% in social media marketing.

Third ranks search engine marketing with 42%.

When asked what the benefits of social media marketing are, the top three benefits that showed up were awareness building (64%), customer loyalty and retention (49%), and expanded reach (46%).