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Five Impacts of CMO Budget Cuts – Gartner 2021 CMO Spend Survey

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CMOs are reporting that marketing budgets are being slashed. Here’s what that means, and practical ideas that go beyond the bad news to how B2B marketers to adapt.

According to Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey, as reported by Laurie Sullivan in MediaPost, “Marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue fell to their lowest level in recent history…Marketing budgets as a proportion of company revenue fell from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021, their lowest point in the history of Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.”

CMOs frustrated by deep budget cutsAs bad as that news is, the situation isn’t entirely gloom and doom. Most CMOs expect budgets to increase modestly this year after the deep cuts during the pandemic. And as the article points out, “It’s not a secret that marketing budgets have always been the first of the enterprise budgets to be cut, and the last to be restored.”

Here are five likely impacts of those budget cuts. But first…
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16 Enigmatic Business Blogging and Other Marketing Stats

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As winter comes to an end, so too does the Winter Wonderland of Marketing Stats series that’s been running here over the past few months. This final installment covers some fascinating though sometimes contradictory and confusing stats about business blogging and the value of marketing.

For example, what percentage of businesses maintain company blogs? It seems to depend who you ask: one source below says 62%, another says 80%, and still another, 86%.  First, all of these numbers seem a tad high; other (fairly) recent research has reported that 55% of small businesses have blogs but just 31% of Fortune 500 enterprises do.

Second, such findings can be significantly impacted by factors like sample set (Is it large enough to be representative? Is it truly random?); the survey methodology (a phone or email survey, for example, is likely to find much different results than one done on Twitter or LinkedIn); and how the questions are asked (a company can “include blogging as part of content marketing strategy” through influencer outreach, LinkedIn Pulse, guest blogging, or other tactics—without actually maintaining its own corporate blog).

The importance of brand purpose in marketing

Image credit: Association of National Advertisers

Another apparent contradiction is much more fundamental: does marketing have value? One may have thought this question was answered years ago by Milan Kundera who famously said, “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”

But apparently not. As noted below, just 29% of CMOs say they can quantitatively prove the long-term impact of marketing on the business. 23% say they can’t prove any impact at all. But, seemingly in support of Kundera’s quote above, Forrester Research says marketers are the ““sole source of sustainable competitive advantage.”

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22 Tantalizing Content Marketing Stats and Facts

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With the near-universal embrace of content marketing—93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing, and B2C marketers are close behind—the amount of brand content being produced has exploded.

But the capacity of buyers to consume content hasn’t changed, making content quality (as noted by several contributors to the 2016 B2B Marketing Trends report) the focus of differentiation moving forward. The top challenge for content marketers will no longer be producing more content, but rather creating relevant content, in the right mix of formats, that connects with buyers on an emotional level.

Growth in video web traffic for content marketing

Image credit: MarketingProfs

Already widespread, content marketing will continue to grow. Because content marketing is increasingly essential (buyers now complete two-thirds of their purchase journey online before ever contacting a vendor) and popular (90% of B2B buyers say online content has a “moderate to major effect” on their selection process), spending on content marketing is expected to nearly double by 2019.

Here are three more key takeaways from the 22 content marketing stats and facts below:

Words today, pictures tomorrow. In B2B purchase decision making, text still rules (for now): 80% of business decision makers say they prefer to get vendor information in a series of articles, and 85% prefer text over video. But that won’t last. [Read more…]

49 Noteworthy Social Networking Stats and Facts

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Though new social networks continue to be launched (e.g. SnapChat, Blab) and some disappear (anyone remember Pownce or Friendster?), the “big three” among both consumers and marketers continue to thrive and dominate.

But there are no guarantees that leadership will last, and the social networking landscape is constantly evolving. As noted below, Instagram is taking off (nearly a third of U.S. marketers used the site in 2015, and that figure is expected to approach 70% by 2017) while Google+ is struggling (though it has 300 million active monthly users worldwide, less than 6 million made any public posts in 2015).

Image credit: Social Media Examiner

Image credit: Social Media Examiner

Here are three more key takeaways from the more than four dozen social networking facts and statistics below:

Facebook is the most popular social network on the planet—except with CEOs. An incredible 71% of all Internet users are on Facebook, including more than half of all online adults aged 65 and older. In addition, 96% of all B2C and 88% of B2B companies use Facebook for marketing. Yet within the 50 largest global companies, not one CEO is active on Facebook.

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33 Thought-Provoking B2B Social Media and Marketing Stats

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As noted in the 2016 B2B Marketing Trends report, B2B marketing strategies and practices are in the midst of significant change, driven by new technologies and evolving buyer expectations for more “consumer-like” experiences.

These changes are affecting tactics, budgets, messaging, and metrics as illustrated in the compilation of B2B marketing facts and statistics below. Here are five key takeaways from this research:

Align B2B marketing with sales

Image credit: e_Strategy Trends

B2B marketing budgets are shifting to digital and social. Overall, B2B marketing budgets are expected to increase, on average, by about 5% in the coming year. But spending on digital marketing programs is projected to rise three times as fast, and over the next five years, the share of budget dollars dedicated to social media marketing will more than double.

We want programmatic advertising—even if we’re not sure what that is. Although nearly two-thirds of B2B marketers say they plan to spend more money on programmatic advertising in 2016, 44% admit they either don’t know how it works or have only a small amount of knowledge about it.

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