Businesses are now acclimatizing as focuses shifted from surviving COVID-19 to co-existing with the pandemic. We’ve been tracking six-core marketing parameters and this week’s insights give you a quick snapshot of where the industry is headed and how CMOs plans are looking for 2021 growth. 

The marketing budget situation

The market has been highly volatile due to the COVID-19 pandemic and following the global recession. Marketing budgets are decreasing. As of August, nearly 42% of marketers reported decreasing marketing budgets. Marketing budgets saw some sharp dips in trends towards June and mid-July.

We found some supporting evidence of these budget cuts in ‘Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey’ which mentioned that 44% of CMOs experienced mid-year budget cuts with 11% expecting significant budget cuts.

The common knee-jerk responses to budget cuts were:

• Canceling/delaying events and campaign launches
• Reducing contractors or changing contract terms
• Halting long-term projects
• Reducing media buying

Top technologies on marketers’ minds

Interestingly, our Pulse Survey indicates that as of August, 33% of marketing budgets are allocated to marketing technology. A seven-day running average across April to August shows that this is how marketing technologies stack up on marketers’ favorites list:

1. Content & Experience
2. Data
3. Social & Relationships
4. Advertising & Promotion
5. Commerce & Sales
6. Management

CMOs plan to aggressively grow sales in their pre-existing market for 2021

COVID-19 has forced CMOs and business heads to take a step back, analyze, and hit the reset button in terms of strategy and how their business functions and the value their products/services actually add to customers. ‘Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey’ shows that 79% of CMOs plans are to increase their wallet share with existing customers with some room for cross-selling. 45% of CMOs plan to add new products to their customer offerings in 2021 through strategic partnerships, product augmentation, or R&D investments.

However, very few CMOs intend to disrupt markets.

Some other key findings from Gartner’s report were:

• Brand strategy beats analytics in the race to be a CMOs’ most vital strategic capability
• Brand strategy included parameters like brand health and benchmarks
• Marketing analytics still makes it to the top-three list of CMOs’ most vital strategic capability
• CMOs’ most valuable metrics will be ROI, Marketing qualified leads (MQLs), Sales qualified leads (SQLs), conversion rate, and CSAT

ClickZ readers’ choice for the week

This week our readers have been seeking a lay of the marketing technology land with a hunger for strategies that can help boost their digital presence, and bottom line. To top it off, the early onset of holiday shopping season has got hundreds of marketers flocking for insights to light up their ecommerce strategies.

1. Adapting to the new normal: Video content strategy after COVID-19
2. The digital marketing landscape: Visualizing the 5 locations of today’s customer journey
3. Key Insights: Holiday shopping ecommerce trends and how your business can win brownie points

Peer Network briefing with TikTok

Yesterday was one exciting evening as we hosted TikTok’s Sam Christie in our Peer Network briefing. Hundreds of marketers from across the globe for some golden nuggets on ‘Engagement for the Next Era’ in our upcoming. Stay tuned for our feature article!

What’s new at ClickZ – Tech Talks

With over 8,000 names technologies according to Scott Brinker, there’s an explosion of marketing technologies on the market and it can be challenging to choose the zero-out on the best one.

After months of research and digesting feedback, we’ve launched Tech Talks, a new initiative by us and our sister brand Search Engine Watch to help make sense of the marketing technology (Martech) landscape.

Dive into a sea of hundreds of marketing technologies to discover your maretch pearl. Visit our Tech Talks zone.