eters are under pressure to reduce martech spending

The marketing budgets will remain flat until 2023, as they have not risen to the levels before COVID. Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, unveiled at Gartner Marketing Symposium and Xpo Denver, revealed this as one of the key findings. A key finding of the survey was that 71% CMOs feel they don’t have enough budget to successfully execute their strategies for this year.

Gartner points to recessionary fears, inflation, and a talent shortage as factors that are causing concern in enterprises. These concerns have a knock-on effect on marketing and marketing technologies investments. Unexpectedly, despite media allocation being flat, digital channel spending actually decreased.

State of martech spending. Martech is facing a bad situation, as 75% of CMOs are feeling pressured by other departments to reduce their technology budgets. The good news is that 63% of CMOs plan to resist this pressure at least to a certain extent and increase their martech expenditure. Nearly a quarter (23%) do plan to cut back.

CMOs propose to increase their social advertising budgets, but search advertising, SEO, and digital OOH are likely to be hit.

Ewan McIntyre presented the findings of the survey and said that it was necessary to “make an obvious value case for Martech investment.” In the same vein, he said that, using an analogy with a journey, what was required was “not a larger boat, but a better boat.”

Dig deep: Digital advertising spend growth falls to 7.8% in this year

Catalytic Marketing. His remarks reflected the dominant theme of the Gartner Keynote delivered by Lizzy Fuo Kune, Vice President Analyst, and Carlos Guerrero VP advisory, in the Gartner marketing practice. They emphasized that despite the pressure to achieve growth in a volatile environment, CMOs shouldn’t take on more projects and increase their activity.

The keynote speakers also questioned “customer obsessiveness” and how it can be taken to unprofitable, intrusive extremes.

Catalytic Marketing isn’t about “more”. “Progressive CMOs have broken free from this cycle by adopting catalytics marketing, and in the process they are shifting their focus from expanding marketing’s scope to increasing marketing’s success,” stated Guerrero.

Why do we care? There are real pressures on martech and marketing investments. The environment demands efficiency and demonstrable returns on investment. Gartner’s message is positive. The catalytic concept must be developed (as an example, they used L’Oreal’s experience).

It’s possible that the part perceived as negative, is that trying to develop a 360-degree view of your customer and applying it to engagement across countless channels could be counterproductive.

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