Key insights: ClickZ benchmark survey, state of industry M&As, and more
Marketing leaders plan on maintaining their marketing budget while allocating roughly 40% to investing in marketing technology, details on top technology of the hour, and more.
Marketing leaders plan on maintaining their marketing budget while allocating roughly 40% to investing in marketing technology, details on top technology of the hour, and more.
We picked the brains of Director+ level executives to bring you juicy data insights on martech spending budgets, the technology they are keen on buying with a further detailed drill-down of each segment. More observations from the industry’s biggest acquisitions in the first quarter.
We recently started tracking six core marketing trends to understand what’s brewing in the marketing technology industry and what exactly are marketing leaders thinking.
Board members, C-level execs, and Director+ level participants from professional services, retail and ecommerce, technology, media and publishing, and education businesses across UK, USA, and India participated in our benchmark survey.
Here are results of the ClickZ and Search Engine Watch: Benchmark survey 2020.
Some key takeaways:
45.2% said they are sticking with their current spends on marketing technology, while 32.9% are increasing their marketing technology spends. There was also a smaller segment of 21.9% said they plan on decreasing their marketing technology budget.
40% of the marketing budget is dedicated to marketing technology.
Content and experience, data, advertising and promotion stood out as the most looked at technology investments.
The next segment gives you a detailed view of these specific technologies.
Our Benchmark survey 2020 further drilled down specifics of technology types marketers are interested in evaluating or purchasing across niches of advertising, sales, management, and more.
Search and social advertising, mobile marketing, and display and programmatic advertising are the top three in this segment.
Technology related to ecommerce marketing, affiliate marketing, and sales automation stood out as the most sorted after sub-sections that marketers would put their money on.
Web experience building and management clocks in at numero uno with 50% marketers favouring it for an investment. The other hot favourites were – email marketing, interactive content, and SEO that tie-up at 47.4% each.
Since data serves more like the all-knowing-eye of a business, the quality and technology serve as the make or break factors. Marketers’ most preferred technology investments were:
The least interesting technology platforms were CDP, DMP, iPaas, cloud/data integration and tag management falling in a range of 13% to 15%.
Project and workflow management software got the lion’s share of the lot with 47.2%, the current work from home/remote work situation due to the COVID-19 lockdown could’ve been one.
Coming in second were budgeting and finance, and vector analysis with 38.9%. Collaboration, product management, and talent management software fall in the lowest slab of 33% to 36%.
The pandemic has further proven that brand relations and sentiment matter. Which is why 61.5% marketers flocked towards wanting to invest in social media marketing and monitoring tools. Next in line were:
Luma’s Q1 2020 Market Report showed that martech which was a hot market for M&As drastically dropped by ~60% both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.
Despite the global economy slowdown, these were some marketing technology industry segments that saw acquisition deals complete.
M&A deal counts fell in Q1 2020 which was lower than the expected when compared to Q1 2019:
However, M&As in the D2C sector rose from two to six transactions in Q1 2020. This is a positive indicator that the D2C sector would be better placed as consumers will be more comfortable to make the shift from brick-and-mortar retailers to online purchasing post the pandemic.
Steps to prepare for the business world past COVID-19. The weekly key insights articles continued to pique marketers’ interest.
A breath of fresh air was that our readers were also keen on non-COVID content which dealt with mastering competitor analysis for digital marketing success.