30-second summary:
As of August, nearly 42% of marketers reported decreasing marketing budgets.
Interestingly, 33% of marketing budgets are allocated to marketing technology.
44% of CMOs experienced mid-year budget cuts with 11% expecting significant budget cuts.
Top marketing technologies on marketers’ minds that will win wallet share.
CMOs’ plans, strategic preferences, and intentions to give 2021 revenues that extra push.
Will they explore beyond their existing markets? Find out what’s in store.
All things new, exciting, and technology that happened at ClickZ this month
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 marketing budget situation
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:
Canceling/delaying events and campaign launches
Reducing contractors or changing contract terms
Halting long-term projects
Reducing media buying
Top technologies on marketers’ minds
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:
Content & Experience
Data
Social & Relationships
Advertising & Promotion
Commerce & Sales
Management
CMOs plan to aggressively grow sales in their pre-existing market for 2021
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:
Brand strategy beats analytics in the race to be a CMOs’ most vital strategic capability
Brand strategy included parameters like brand health and benchmarks
Marketing analytics still makes it to the top-three list of CMOs’ most vital strategic capability
CMOs’ most valuable metrics will be ROI, Marketing qualified leads (MQLs), Sales qualified leads (SQLs), conversion rate, and CSAT
ClickZ readers’ choice for the week
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.
Adapting to the new normal: Video content strategy after COVID-19
The digital marketing landscape: Visualizing the 5 locations of today’s customer journey
Key Insights: Holiday shopping ecommerce trends and how your business can win brownie points
Peer Network briefing with TikTok
Yesterday was one exciting evening as we hosted TikTok’s Sam Christie in our Peer Network briefing. Hundreds of marketers from across the globe for some golden nuggets on ‘Engagement for the Next Era’ in our upcoming. Stay tuned for our feature article!
What’s new at ClickZ – Tech Talks
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 choose the 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 maretch pearl. Visit our Tech Talks zone.
The post Key Insights: Marketing technology industry August snapshot and CMOs’ plans appeared first on ClickZ.
Source: ClickZ
Link: Key Insights: Marketing technology industry August snapshot and CMOs’ plans
