• More Investment.
• Efficiency and Effectiveness.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment.
• Personalization.
• Advertising.
• Multichannel Marketing (Sometimes Called “Single Customer View (SCV)”).
• AI-Driven Workflows and Buyers’ Journeys.
• Conversational Marketing.
• Automated Attribution.
• Marketing Automation is No Longer Distinct From Any Other Marketing Strategy.

If your budget has already been cut, it’s important that you do all you can to protect against further cuts by justifying the value of marketing investments to the enterprise, and squeezing the most value from the remaining budget you have. In fact, even if your budget has not been cut, these are essential steps to take, minimizing the threat of potential future cuts and maximizing value. 

This is the essence of marketing cost optimization. While the natural response to budget cuts may be to slice away at budget line items, Gartner recommends a programmatic approach, which looks at optimizing all elements across marketing’s operational mix: labor, agencies, technology and channels. To do this, CMOs need to answer three fundamental questions:

How do I prove the value of the marketing investments I need to protect?
How do I identify the costs I can afford to cut?
How do I optimize marketing costs to drive greater ROI? 

Are brands retrenching on martech under COVID, relying on tried and tested stack components? Or are they willing to experiment and try new solutions to seize unexpected opportunities which might come their way?

“It’s hard to generalize,” said HubSpot VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker in a recent appearance on MarTech Live. Among other things, it depends on a brand’s digital maturity, he said. Would a brand get value out of a new martech tool? “For a relatively mature, technologically speaking, marketing team it’s entirely possible; for someone further down the curve, there might just be other priorities.”

Based on our Forecast 2021 survey of nearly 100 marketing professionals, martech is not expected to take nearly as big a hit as other areas. According to our survey, 55% of respondents expect their advertising and campaign budgets to take the biggest hit for 2021, compared to martech spend (18%) and personnel (16%).  The findings align with Gartner’s recently released 2020 CMO Spend survey, in which 24% of respondents said martech spending would still be a priority in 2021 despite the upheaval.

Our survey found 60% of respondents said the majority of their martech budget will be spent on new platforms and solutions, and 26% said that investment would be on new virtual events solutions. 

That 60% said the focus will be on new platforms and solutions suggests the trend we outlined last year with our Martech Replacement Survey has not abated despite the upheaval. In that report, we found half of marketers were replacing home-grown solutions with new technology.

Key Findings:

-Technology is realized as a key element in navigating the pandemic – 41% of ITDMs anticipate their tech budgets will increase in the next 12 months (bouncing back from 25% in April), and another 35% expect budgets to be stable.
-CEOs’ top priority for IT continues to be to lead digital business/digital transformation initiatives, and 59% of respondents agree that the effects of the pandemic are accelerating their digital transformation efforts.
-As a result of COVID-19, 64% of ITDMS say that increasing operational efficiency has increased importance as a digital business objective, followed by creating better customer experiences (58%) and improving security (58%).
-In order to become a digital business, ITDMs expect to invest more into big data/analytics, business process management and mobile devices over the next 12 months compared to three months ago.
-COVID-19 continues to change how we work, with the majority of organizations (52%) saying they won’t see employees back in the office in 2020, and organizations are facing the reality that on average only 23% of their workforce needs to be in the office for their business to be fully operational.