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Marketers will spend $112bn (85bn) worldwide on social media advertising in 2020, despite many of them "doing it wrong", new research reveals.

Analysts at Forrester found that just under a third (31%) of chief marketing officers cannot show the impact of social media on their businesses.

This is because, the report argues, "social media stumps marketers. First, they had unrealistic expectations of social media, hoping it would be the key to unlocking massive profits in the digital age. When that didnt pan out, they shifted 180 degrees to believing that social medias only use was for advertising. Although its true that Facebooks primary business value is as an advertising platform, its a mistake to infer that advertising is social medias sole opportunity."

Instead of having a "social marketing strategy", the study says, marketers should instead use social tactics and technology strategically alongside other channels to achieve broader marketing goals.

The report also details the reasons for most marketers social errors and how companies should use social skills to augment other marketing functions.

For example, user-generated content can be effective outside social features where it is gathered and displayed. Forrester said the "gold standard" of this approach is Apples integrated campaign "Shot on iPhone", which repurposes images and videos that users produce on the smartphone into TV spots, billboards and print ads.

Social media has also improved as a tool for brand sentiment, the report explains, because the platforms are taking their role in ensuring brand health more seriously. Twitter, for example, allows brands to buy customer feedback in Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction Score formats.

Social media adspend is forecast by Publicis Groupe's Zenith to be the second-fastest-growing channel between 2019 and 2022 at 13.8%, behind online video (16.6%).

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Social media adspend to hit $112bn even though it 'stumps' marketers - CampaignLive

The new year is a time when we naturally assess what went well in the twelve months prior, and what wed like to do differently moving forward. Thats true for businesses, too, especially since many have annual goals for growth and profit.

Theres no better time to turn over a new leaf, after all, than a new year. As we move into 2020, there are four resolutions that all business owners should seriously consider making if they havent already.

If youre feeling hesitant, I have good news: These resolutions are relatively easy to implement, and they can all yield major payoffs.

1. Look at your PR.

Do you know how customers perceive your brand currently? This can be difficult to track because customers wont always share their thoughts with you.

Investing in PR tools and services can be a great choice for businesses, especially if youre trying to scale and struggling to do so. Plenty of PR agencies, for example, offer suggestions on how to promote brand awareness and improve the customer perception of your brand.

As you look at your current PR efforts, consider writing and distributing press releases, appearing as an expert source in written and televised appearances, and monitoring your brands reputation online.

2. Invest in marketing.

You cant grow your business without marketing. No one will hire you or buy from you if they dont know that you exist.

Quality marketing campaigns are necessary to scale your business. This can include any combination of platforms and channels, including search engine optimization, content marketing, PPC campaigns, social marketing, email marketing and more.

If youre on a tight budget, start with free and low-cost channels. Brush up on your SEO basics. Set up email marketing to keep current leads and customers engaged. Use social to create more touch points and nurture relationships. These marketing channels do require a consistent time investment, but they wont break the bank.

3. Carefully monitor cash flow.

Cash flow is a huge issue for businesses. In fact, its one reason many small businesses have to close up shop. Making a diligent effort to monitor and manage your cash flow should be a resolution for 2020.

While small business profitability can be wildly unpredictable, there are steps you can take to better monitor your cash flow. Use invoice and expense tracking software such as FreshBooks or QuickBooks to monitor all upcoming expenses and current profitability.

Use reports to look at your businesss past performance, identifying what will likely be high-earning months and low-earning months so that you can prepare and ensure that all of your costs are covered.

Knowing what expenses are coming can be an enormous asset in financial planning, making your life much easier in the process.

4. Improve customer service.

Customers will jump ship if they feel the customer service is lacking, and 96% of all customers believe that customer service is an important factor when it comes to choosing a brand.You cant afford not to have great customer service.

Customer service is one of the biggest drivers in business right now, largely because its a consumers market. There are so many competitors out there, and customer service is what sets businesses apart. You can actually earn new customers simply because theyve heard that customer service is a priority.

Invest in strong customer service. Make sure that any client-facing team members have adequate training in service, even if theyre account managers or other types of specialized workers. You should also consider looking into a quality answering service if youre experiencing a high volume of calls and youre struggling to keep up, ensuring all customers are receiving the care they need.

The new year is here, and its time to get your business resolutions in order. Take a look at where you struggled most last year, identifying pain points that you can mitigate moving into 2020. Nothing will change unless you put measures in place to shake things up, and these four resolutions are a strong place to start.

Theres never any harm in better PR, strong marketing, increased cash flow and a boost in customer service, so even if youre happy with where you stood in 2019, look for room for improvement for 2020.

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Four Ways To Help Your Business Stand Out From The Competition This Year - Forbes

Stella & Dot wants to amplify its power of social selling.

On Jan. 3, the company announced changes to its existing representative base by allowing brand ambassadors to sell across its three direct sales offerings: beauty brand Ever, accessory line Keep Collective and its namesake fashion brand Stella & Dot. Prior to this change, Stella & Dots ambassadors signed up and sold for only one brand.

Our brands are separate from a consumer perspective, but our true reason for being as a company is to empower the modern woman with the ultimate side gig, so she can untether from [work] hours that just dont work for her, said Jessica Herrin, Stella & Dot CEO and founder.

To facilitate more cross-brand selling activity across its existing 30,000-plus ambassadors and lure new ones, Stella & Dot has developed a new social retail styling app called Mimi. Representatives can create and share curated pages of shoppable products in a mood board-like setting that promotes beauty, fashion and accessories equally. Then, ambassadors are able to share direct links of these pages to customers through social media, email and text for a frictionless click-to-buy shopping experience.

Its like Pinterest had a baby with Polyvore and Shopify, said Herrin. She said ambassadors boards could, for example, promote a custom skin-care routine or a total fashion and beauty look for an evening out.

Across its three brands, Stella & Dot ambassadors sign up for a $199 starter kit of products and materials and earn 20%-40% commission depending on quantity of sales and level of commitment. They are paid weekly and typically earn $100 to $1,000 a month or $1,200 to $200,900 annually, on average. To make itself more digitally savvy through Mimi and other tech tools, Stella & Dot spent more than $50 million over the course of the last year. The company declined to share annual revenue figures but said that it has paid out more than $500 million in commissions since its launch in 2004. Stella & Dot also recently aligned itself with Nordstrom in November to sell Stella & Dot and Keep Collective products in 26 brick-and-mortar retail locations and on Nordstrom.com.

Stella & Dots rejiggering comes at a time when social selling has consolidated across the market. In May, Natura & Co announced its plan to acquire Avon Products to leverage synergies across both companies. In the third-quarter results that followed, Avon Products saw mixed results from these shifts: Avon revenue decreased by 16% year over year and active representatives declined by 10%. But there were signs of hope. When compared to the second quarter, representatives increased by 1%.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Nik Modi said that improving Natura and Avon Products representative retentionwas the single most important thing they [needed] to do to stabilize the business.

Meanwhile, Coty terminated its partnership with Younique in August. In the companys third-quarter earnings call, Coty CEO Pierre Laubies said, Younique, like all multi-level marketing businesses, [went] through a phase of classic hype. Unfortunately, we are in the de-hype phase. Data from market research firm Euromonitor International further proves this point. Between 2018 and 2017, direct sales fell by 9% to $4.94 billion.

Enabling direct selling ease through technology is a key learning that all social selling companies have to reckon with as digital influencers and Instagram Shopping have become swaps for stores. While Herrin said customers have always been interested in all of Stella & Dots merchandise across category, the company previously did not make it easy.

By giving Stella & Dots brand ambassadors more tools to amplify their sales, like with Mimi, Herrin expects to double its existing monthly active representatives, or those that are receiving a paycheck from the company, from 10,000 to 20,000.

[Ambassadors] are the brand; its their authentic recommendations that drive conversion in their circles. By taking away the all complexities, we are thinking about whats in it for the customer, she said. A lot of women would like to build a large [social] following, but its the nano-influencer or everywoman that drives sales. Mimi is for women who dont have swipe-ups or have time to create their own content regularly, so we are empowering their recommendations and brand for them.

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Stella & Dot puts focus on ambassadors by merging its three brands - Glossy

PHOTO: Jared

Readers of our most popular digital marketing content cared about privacy, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and social media strategies in 2019. Put those popular articles together, and you've got digital marketers that want to utilize intelligent technology in hot marketing areas like social media but in a way that respects customer data privacy.

Without further ado, we present CMSWire's top 10 digital marketing articles:

Let's face it: Fully engaged customers spend more and stay around longer. Therefore customer marketing is going to play an increasingly important role in how B2B companies do business in the near future.

Marketers have had to contend with challenges stemming from SEO for greater than 20 years now. According to HubSpots State of Inbound 2018 report, 61% of marketers feel improving SEO and growing their organic presence is the top inbound marketing priority.

Marketing technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, with one of the most exciting developments being the creation of publicly-available, cost-effective cognitive APIs by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, Amazon and others.

Mary Meekers highly-anticipated Internet Trends report was released. Within it were some takeaways from marketers in the areas of mobile, omnichannel experiences, ecommerce, voice technologies, consumer product recommendations and others. Here is what you need to know.

It was April 2019 and the clock was ticking on the next major mandate for customer data privacy and protection, scheduled then to arrive in just a few months. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) officially goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, yet many businesses are still sleeping at the switch.

Jaws dropped when IBM announcedit was selling its commerce and marketing cloud business to investment firm Centerbridge Partners.

Some studies and digital marketing thought leaders are finding that social media is losing its mojo. To delve deeper into this issue we got in touch with a range of marketers to gauge their views on the health of social media marketing going into 2020.

More than 26,000 descended upon the Boston Exhibition and Convention Center in September for HubSpot's annual INBOUND conference. The annual conference has nearly doubled in growth since 2015. We were on hand to catch the latest news from the marketing automation and CRM company.

With the help of leading industry experts, we define what surprise and delight marketing is, what forms it can take and how this marketing tactic is being used in the field.

Whats the most valuable social media platform for many B2B marketers? Heres the answer that wont shock you: LinkedIn.

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The Top 10 Digital Marketing Articles of 2019 - CMSWire

With estimates predicting that influencer marketing spending might double in 2020en route to becoming a projected $15 billion market by 2022its a good bet that influencers will be moving further up the priority lists ofmany brand marketers.

Importantly, this growth will come from brands investing in influencer marketing for the first time, in addition to existing brands that have experienced strong returns and are expanding their investments accordingly.

Yet, despite the increased budgets and the rising number ofbrands looking to participate, influencer marketingis still sometimesdescribed as the Wild West. It certainly wasnt without its fair share of controversy in 2019, and the responsibility for professionalizingand standardizingpractices continues to be shared between the platforms, regulators and agencies.

With this in mind, here are my five predictions for 2020:

One natural evolution of influencer marketing has been the integration of paid media budgets to deliver targeted amplification of influencers posts. It delivers the media metrics that brands are used to seeing, and its an obvious goldmine for the platforms, who previously saw none of therevenue from the deals made between influencers andbrands.

Expect to see paid amplification made even easier and, as a result, it will become the norm on influencer campaigns, thanks to the key benefits it brings: increased levels of control for audience targeting; much needed reach and scale; and robust reporting and transparency that will be available around campaign delivery.

The influencer marketing industry has, for far too long, relied on social metrics like follower counts, likesand engagement rates as a benchmark of success. These vanity metrics are a proxy at best, and do not provide any real indication as to which talent is right for a brand, or if a collaboration was truly successful at delivering real business objectives.

Today, it is table stakes for marketers to require verifiable campaign metrics, including audience demographics, unique reach, actual impressions and video views delivered. In 2020,look for more brands and their partners to measure effectiveness via influencer campaign brand uplift studies, conversion and sales lift reportsand creative analysis in order to compare influencer work more directly alongside other parts of the marketing mix.

Most influencer marketing tends to fail when it comes to what messages arepublished. Often, brands are reluctant to hand over too much creative freedom to influencers, resulting in content that makes little sense for either the influencer or their audience. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a brand can relinquishall control to the influencer, who then produces something which may be a popular piece of content with their audience but doesnt actually deliver the appropriate messages and impact for the brand.

Balance is necessary, and brands are seeing exciting creative production capabilities coming from the influencer community,such asthe ability to localize a concept across the globe or tap into the mindset of a diverse range of communities and culturesall while staying on-brief.

When brands start their influencer campaigns with a solid brief, expect to see more suitably matchedbrands and influencers, more authentic and exciting work and more examples of influencer-produced creative that powers other marketing campaigns, from digital mediato print and OOH.

The notion that influencers are becoming increasingly meaningful channels for brands, combined with advances in data and measurement, will undoubtedly lead to longer-term collaborations between the most-effectively matched influencers and brands. And the outcome will be mutually beneficial.

For the brand, there are significant efficiency benefits to the relationship. In addition to the fact that the influencer is able to become a more authentic advocate with a much deeper relationship, it can drive real product and market insights, too.

For the influencer (the publisher), who needs to generate income, thebenefit lies in having both the financial security and opportunity to work continually on a brand collaboration that makes sense for them and for their audience.

Going one step further, you can expect to see more and more partnerships between influencers and brands working together to co-create products or even new brands.

With numerous reports of undisclosed brand collaborations, botaccounts,fraudulent audiences, manipulated results and the blurring of lines between organic and paid, its no surprise that a lack of transparency has been the major complaint about the influencer industry.

And while total eradication of these issues isnt a reality for 2020, the level of sophistication of the data, technology and education now available should enable a more informed and accountable process for influencer marketing. The issue of transparency will hopefully be banished to the fringes and will no longer be the central talking point in the majority of influencer marketing campaigns.

If these predictions become reality then, as a result, we can expect to see the influencer marketing industry taking some giant strides towards raising its professional standards, whichshould pave the way for even greater growth in 2021.

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5 ways influencer marketing will evolve in 2020 - AdAge.com