Good news for marketers looking to expand their efforts: marketing budgets are expected to climb by 12% in 2017, according to Gartner’s new CMO Spend Survey. Amazingly, this marks the third year in a row that marketing spend has swelled.
If you’re like most marketers, you’re glad to have more resources at hand. But what’s fueling this growth? The answer, in large part, is an increased emphasis on smarter technology and the way that tech expands influence through precise, people-based marketing.
Why Marketers Are More Powerful Than Ever
As indicated by the ballooning budgets, companies are increasingly recognizing the critical value of marketing. “Over the last several years, we’ve witnessed an expansion of the CMO mandate, from what was largely a promotional role to what is now often seen as the growth engine for the business,” notes Gartner’s research. No longer is marketing just about brand awareness—more and more, it’s actually driving revenue.
That’s because today, brands compete on customer experience as much as the actual offering. With the advent of the Internet Age—where buyers actively search out products instead of having products broadcast at them—consumers are interacting with marketing more than ever. “As customer journeys become increasingly self-directed and customer preferences migrate to digital channels, these marketing-controlled touchpoints will continue to expand,” states Gartner’s report.
In fact, its research shows that some of the greatest growth is centered around the digital sphere: “Customer experience and digital commerce are the top two areas of innovation projects marketing leaders say they’re currently pursuing — 53% for customer experience and 51% for digital commerce.”
Technology Makes Marketers More Effective
So, we know marketers’ budgets and roles are expanding—but why? Technology is fueling is huge part of this shift. For the first time, CMO marketing tech spending is expected to surpass CIO tech spending in 2017, according to Gartner.
In particular, analytics and intelligence spending is on the rise. 57% of leading marketers predict an increase in marketing analytics spending, along with 54% who predict greater spending in customer intelligence.
That reflects a growing sense that it’s simply not enough to advertise at scale: you need to truly connect with consumers on an individual, people-based level—and that takes deeper intelligence.
At Resonate, we couldn’t agree more. We believe that understanding and targeting the “human elements” of people is an absolute game-changer. It’s the most effective and affordable way to reach people with relevant marketing that actually impacts and accelerates buying behavior.
Here’s how our platform empowers you to do just that. We take our proprietary consumer intelligence based on the largest consumer survey data in the US (with over 200,000 active respondents) and fuse it with our contextual analysis of internet behavior. Our cookies cover 90% of the US adult online population—allowing us to scale in-depth answers to users at large.
Thanks to our survey’s probing, meaningful questions, our clients can market to actual individuals based on their real-time values, beliefs, and motivations. This goes well beyond traditional demographics, purchase data, basic online behavioral monitoring, and psychographics. We let you tap into what inspires customers to buy and stay engaged at an individual level. (And we do it with both the precision and scale others can’t offer.)
Clients access our intelligence and targeting capabilities via one “always on,” easy-to-use platform—it puts continuous on-the fly research, insights, analysis, activation and measurement all at your fingertips.
