Two-Thirds of Marketers Expected to Achieve Same or More Despite Inflation and Recession Driving Current Budget Cuts

Integrate, the leader in B2B Precision Demand Marketing (PDM), announced new research on “The State of B2B Marketing Budgets 2022” that reveals insights on how marketers are responding to economic headwinds. The research was conducted with Demand Metric, a global research and advisory firm. The report found that nearly 60% of B2B marketers report current budgets being cut or staying flat and two-thirds of marketers are expected to accomplish the same or more with fewer resources. However, despite those challenges, 80% of B2B marketers surveyed report having a neutral to optimistic outlook for 2023.

According to the September 2022 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the forecast for global economic activity will remain subdued for the rest of the year before declining in 2023. The U.S. implemented aggressive interest rate hikes earlier than other countries, and as a result will see more progress in slowing inflation than in the euro area or in the U.K.

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“B2B marketing has always been hard, but today, marketers are tasked with the impossible: They’re expected to do more with less,” said Colby Cavanaugh, SVP of Marketing at Integrate. “There’s never been a better time to invest in greater precision, reduce redundancies, and focus on adopting a more powerful, buyer-driven, cross-channel Precision Demand Marketing approach to maximize your marketing efforts.”

The State of Marketing Budget report found that the leading driving forces behind marketing budget shifts were from inflation and economic recession. As a result, 21% of respondents reported their budget being cut mid-year and one-third of B2B marketers report less staff this year than last.

When it comes to marketing approaches, the tides have changed for marketers with only 27% reporting that ABM/ABX is a key part of their strategy. Today, marketers are primarily focused the trifecta of:

• (1) a buyer-driven & cross-channel strategy (54%)
• (2) an always-on approach (43%)
• (3) traditional demand gen (43%).

To calibrate to current market shifts, marketers plan to invest the most in digital marketing (48%), content creation (47%), and customer marketing 46%). Conversely, they will plan to spend less on ABM (41%), field or event marketing (35%), and communications (34%).

While respondents were nearly evenly split on their satisfaction with their current MarTech stack, almost 95% of respondents report some redundancies in their MarTech stack.

“These results suggest that there is a great deal of opportunity for B2B marketers to be more efficient and effective in everything from their strategies to their tech stack,” said John Follett, Co-Founder, CXO & Head of Research at Demand Metric. “Marketers may be overwhelmingly optimistic for 2023, but in order to succeed in the months ahead, they need to be prepared to act with greater precision and drive tangible, repeatable revenue results that can scale.”

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