Cold Email: Martech budgets 2020: Increasing, varied investment, volume

Chief Marketer released a “2019 Martech Outlook Survey” this week which reveals some interesting insight into the industry. The survey includes responses from both B2B and B2C marketers.

Key findings include:

54% of marketers think martech budgets will increase next year.
Many marketers (39%, the largest group) report spending 10-25% of their marketing budgets on martech.
Top choices of types of martech where people plan to invest in the next year are email, automation, and social media.
50% of marketers said their biggest frustration around purchasing is the volume of solutions in the market.

Are martech budgets increasing, decreasing, or static?

The martech budget forecast looks positive over the next year. 54% of marketers expect martech budgets to increase and 34% say they’ll stay the same. Just 4% anticipate a decrease.

However, we should also note that Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey last month said that marketing budgets dropped 11% for the first time in five years. It also noted that 61% of CMOs expect budgets to recover.

How much marketing budget goes to martech?

Within overall marketing budgets, what portion is spent on martech? The most popular range (39% of respondents) is to spend 10-25% of overall budget on martech. In second place (30%) was spending 0-10% of overall budget. Unsurprisingly, a small percentage of respondents spend 40% or more of their budget on martech.

That said, a report from Gartner earlier this year showed that on average, marketing technology now accounts for almost one-third of marketing budgets. And this proportion has grown more than 30% in the past year.

What types of martech will marketers invest in next?

With so many solutions (and types of solutions) on the market, this next finding shows some interesting results.

The image below shows planned martech investments in the next twelve months. We see email marketing as the top choice with 54% planning investment here, which is interesting as we might assume people already use one. The findings are unclear as to if these include investment in existing platforms as well as new, but we might safely assume the former.

Marketing automation and social media management come in a close second and third at 51% and 50% , respectively. Other top choices include CRM, customer experience, video, personalization, CMS, and sales automation, as we might predict.

CDP investment seems to be growing as well with nearly a quarter of marketers planning investment.

Interestingly AI/machine learning seems to be catching up to mobile, at 16% and 18%, respectively.

And finally, it’s worth noting that for all its hype, voice remains at a quite low adoption, just 8%.

Top frustrations marketers have around purchasing

50% of marketers responded that they are frustrated by the “volume of solutions on the market,” the survey found. The second biggest frustration (at 45%) was “lack of available budget.”

The volume of solutions challenge definitely resonates with a lot of marketers as the vendor list grows to 7000 and counting. Understandably, it can be hard to cut through the noise. The budget challenge looks slightly more manageable as we saw more than half of marketers anticipate budgets to increase in the next year.