Marketing Budgets Holding Up Despite Economy
Monday, March 23, 2009

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According to the CMO Council's annual Marketing Outlook study, customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in 2009.

The Council's audit of more than 650 marketers worldwide revealed that, in spite of this anxiety, budgets are still holding up as dollars are directed against growing and retaining market share. Additional findings:

• Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the No. 1 force impacting budget allocations in 2009, followed by slower selling cycles and reduced consumer spending. Only 14.9% point to financial market disarray as a determining factor.

• Retraining and developing existing staff is the leading strategy for acquiring or sharpening expertise in digital marketing competencies, with 62.9% of respondents electing training over recruiting new talent (28.6%) or outsourcing (17.1%).

• The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are e-mail marketing (44.9%) and online surveys and research (33.2%). Only 10.1% are investing in master data, 12.8% in marketing operational systems and 9.3% in marketing resource or process management solutions.

• Growing or retaining market share is the leading executive mandate for marketers (47.6%), followed by lowering costs and improving go-to-market efficiencies (43.5%) and improving customer insight and retention (32.5%).

• The majority of marketers are sticking to old online measures like page views and registrations (64.6%), site traffic and volume (58.4%) and search prominence (45.2%).

• Digital marketing and new media dominates demand generation and advertising spend allocation priorities for the coming year, with budgets aimed at online and Web 2.0 initiatives almost 50% higher than spend earmarked for traditional media.

• Just 9.3% of marketers rate their e-metrics and measurement capabilities as excellent; 35.6% of marketers are questioning spend, struggling to quantify value or are simply not doing a good job of converting visitors to leads or to customers.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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