The Latest Trends in Marketing Tech

If you know me, even a little bit, you know I love surveys and enjoy asking people what they think about a topic to later quantify it in one of my articles.

Of course, I rarely get to do the latter now as I stopped being a journalist.

Nevertheless, our articles for our clients still allow me to jump in with both feet in a lot of reports!

And this means that I've also found some new studies to share with you in this issue.

So let's jump in...

How are Chief Marketers Planning to Use MarTech?

A just-released joint study by market research firm Deloitte and DUKE FUQA business school focused on how chief marketing officers (CMOs) plan to use marketing technology in their growth strategies.

• Spending on MarTech has increased from last year to reach 20% of marketing budgets up from 17% in 2023.
• Not only that CMOs expect to allocate around 31% of their budgets to AI and other SaaS products within the next five years

Generating Results from Business AI Tools is the Problem, Not Budget

Both the above study and another one by research house Gartner show data that MarTech utilization has been a problem since 2020.

• Gartner's study shows that marketers reported a drop in their company's ability to utilize the full capabilities of the marketing technology tools they bought to only 33% on average in 2023,?down from 42% in 2022?and 58% in 2020
• Deloitte's results show the same trend. CMOs rated themselves as an average of 4.9 on a scale of 1-7 in their ability to fully integrate and use MarTech
• The rating for finding and hiring marketing heads who know how to use new AI technology is around 3.9 from 7

These numbers show a difficulty in marketers' ability to keep up with the expanding capability of AI business tools available at their disposable

Is Your B2B Following the Same Marketing Budget Trends?

The same Deloitte 2024 spring report highlighted some interesting trends in marketing budgets.

• Spending on MarTech came at the expense of branding and customer relationship management, spending on both dropped a whopping 41% and 37% from last year
• Also despite the increase in MarTech budgets, marketing budgets have generally decreased to around 10% of surveyed businesses' total budget, down from 12.3% a year earlier
• B2Bs have seen a steeper fall, with marketing's share of the total budget falling to 8%
• However, B2Bs have significantly increased their channel partnerships in their go-to-market phase, with almost 67% of companies resorting to service providers and distributors in said phase
• B2Bs are spending less on social media, around 7.3% of their total budgets, which is in line with the global decline in social media spending. However, expenditure on social media is expected to bounce back and grow to around 12% by 2029

My Take

You are marketing to humans, even when you're a B2B. The above studies show a decline in customers' perception of service quality, which is linked to dealing with bots and a whole lot of automation.

First invest in uping the AI skills of your team then integrate the right AI tools that don't impact the quality of your customer relations.

It's only worth running after the AI train when upgrading your primary product or service.

Here are Four Ways I Can Help You Up Your B2B Game

1-Boost Your B2B Leads - Get a consultation call about your B2B content marketing

2- Uncover Hidden Opportunities - Ask us for an audit of your website content and SEO

3- Get a powerful new company profile presentation or pitch deck

4- Revamp your website in a couple of weeks

You can, of course, DM here all your questions instead of through the above links.