Are Marketing Budgets keeping up?
Its quite clear that more and more money is being spent on marketing and in particular marketing technology.
In fact it was in 2012 that Laura Mclellan from Gartner predicted that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on tech than the CIO.
So where does all this extra money come from and are budgets keeping up?
I don’t think that this coming out of the IT budget as they have their own innovations going on with cloud computing but it does leave a question mark over the the responsibility of all this technology.
One thing for sure is that the CIO and CMO are either going to merge or have to work very closely together going forward.
Budget wise I think money has to move from the traditional advertising spend and over to innovation and tech. Not all of it of course and certainly not straight away. This is a idea i picked up from reading the excellent book Z.E.R.O by Joseph Jaffe.
I think companies need to be sensible about the marketing tech spend and look for solutions with a clear ROI. At least the beauty of cloud based systems is for the smaller products such as Virally the commitment is month to month. However for the larger marketing automation system the investment and commitment can be very high.
My advice with any of these systems large or small would be to make sure you research them and whatever systems you do use really invest the time to understand the software and get the most out of it.
Equally if more money is being spent on marketing tech then so should the investment into your staff to get the most out of it. Digital marketing is an evolving and fast paced industry and requires as many technology based skills as well as the marketing fundamentals.
There is a lot of talk around big data and social media and now the inevitable question of ROI. With all this additional spend will need to be justified and accounted for.
So are companies marketing budgets keeping up? We don’t know quite yet, but my theory is those that embrace the change and adopt the right technology and training will get the results that not only justify it but enable those organisations to stay ahead of the curve.
There is still a lot of debate on the value of advertising at all size companies and budgets. Advertising is expensive and is still difficult to measure but not impossible. It is for sure still intrusive and interruption based, in general i don’t think the majority of people want to be faced with advertising but understand it some cases its required.
I still think they people are waiting for skip video button on YouTube and and have trained themselves to ignore the adverts in both Google and Facebook.
However people will still argue and i am sure correctly that advertising still works. I think its not advertising we hate as much as bad advertising. In fact using Google Adwords and Facebook ads correctly is both trackable and can give returns but may require some testing to be done first. Dont expect any results while testing is the best advice i can give on this.
So maybe this is where the budget needs to come from, with so much money spent on advertising surely if some of that was spent on marketing technology and training CMO’s would see a ROI over a period of time.
The other issue is that marketing is not just about attracting new clients anymore. The marketing team is now involved in pre-sales questions and content creation as well as support and client retention.
With all of this in mind the old system and budgets are simply out of date and a new role for marketing needs to be implemented that spans across the organization and with the required budget to do its job.
Easier said than done I agree, however those that embrace this new model will thrive and those that don’t well we shall see.
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