Key Insights: Marketing technology industry August snapshot and CMOs' plans
Our Pulse Survey insights into marketing budgets, impact on martech, favorite technologies, and an early peek into CMOs’ strategies and preferences for 2021.
Our Pulse Survey insights into marketing budgets, impact on martech, favorite technologies, and an early peek into CMOs’ strategies and preferences for 2021.
Businesses are now acclimatizing as focuses shifted from surviving COVID-19 to co-existing with the pandemic. We’ve been tracking six-core marketing parameters and this week’s insights give you a quick snapshot of where the industry is headed and how CMOs plans are looking for 2021 growth.
The market has been highly volatile due to the COVID-19 pandemic and following the global recession. Marketing budgets are decreasing. As of August, nearly 42% of marketers reported decreasing marketing budgets. Marketing budgets saw some sharp dips in trends towards June and mid-July.
We found some supporting evidence of these budget cuts in ‘Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey’ which mentioned that 44% of CMOs experienced mid-year budget cuts with 11% expecting significant budget cuts.
The common knee-jerk responses to budget cuts were:
Interestingly, our Pulse Survey indicates that as of August, 33% of marketing budgets are allocated to marketing technology. A seven-day running average across April to August shows that this is how marketing technologies stack up on marketers’ favorites list:
COVID-19 has forced CMOs and business heads to take a step back, analyze, and hit the reset button in terms of strategy and how their business functions and the value their products/services actually add to customers.
‘Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey’ shows that 79% of CMOs plans are to increase their wallet share with existing customers with some room for cross-selling.
45% of CMOs plan to add new products to their customer offerings in 2021 through strategic partnerships, product augmentation, or R&D investments.
However, very few CMOs intend to disrupt markets.
Some other key findings from Gartner’s report were:
This week our readers have been seeking a lay of the marketing technology land with a hunger for strategies that can help boost their digital presence, and bottom line.
To top it off, the early onset of holiday shopping season has got hundreds of marketers flocking for insights to light up their ecommerce strategies.
With over 8,000 names technologies according to Scott Brinker, there’s an explosion of marketing technologies on the market and it can be challenging to zero-out on the best one.
After months of research and digesting feedback, we’ve launched Tech Talks, a new initiative by us and our sister brand Search Engine Watch to help make sense of the marketing technology (Martech) landscape.
Dive into a sea of hundreds of marketing technologies to discover your martech pearl. Visit our Tech Talks zone.