Last month, MarTech Series published its take on Gartner’s report for Seven areas that the CMO will most likely spend in 2019. The seven areas are:

1. Digital Marketing
2. MarTech
3. Advertising
4. Workshorses
5. Innovation
6. Customer Experience
7. Personalization

Gartner predicts that 29% of the annual CMO budget will be disbursed towards MarTech. Now, we are jotting down industry chatter around the report.

Tech Feed from the Industry

For industry stalwarts, the budget allocation comes as no surprise. Due to the high-value associated with customer acquisition — more importantly, retention after the acquisition, digital analytics, content management, and email marketing tools will be progressive.  Marketing leads on the surface will pay attention to analytics. However, the end goal should always be to focus on the entire customer experience paradigm, according to Scott Brinker, HubSpot VP, and MarTech Conference program chair.

Acquia CMO Lynne Capozzi concurred with Scott’s views saying that higher spend on MarTech is the need of the hour because there is a need to connect complex systems and data to deliver great customer experience.

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Larger enterprises have a lot more scope to invest in Marketing Technology rather than invest in staff. Obviously, this is not the case with smaller brands, says Phil Ahad, EVP of Strategy and Products at online survey provider, Toluna.

Similarly, David Frankel, the managing partner of sales and marketing consultancy, Slingstone Group, was not surprised by the findings. With his vast experience — personal and professional — he says he knows that there is a lot of noise in marketplaces about mining for data, which is relevant to the customer experience.

Earlier this decade, marketers had already started talking about Big Data. But their efforts were directed towards structuring it. Maybe people really did not get what to do with data at that point. But now marketers are focusing on providing stellar consumer experiences through data. Thanks to proper utilization of data, marketers are now able to specifically target prospective buyers and are confident that they can back it up by providing good customer service. Again, this requires a budget extension on MarTech, which renders the report true.

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He is also very confident that MarTech spending will not drop in the years to come. Since AI is the latest buzzword and possibly a technology that every marketer will rely on, spending is needed for AI so that the capabilities can capture good, clean and meaningful data. He says that AI will be leveraged by marketers as SaaS subscriptions.

David’s thoughts were echoed by Bayer VP of Media Strategy and Platforms, Josh Palau, who agreed that MarTech will mostly come from the Cloud and as a SaaS subscription. He cited the example of Social Media Listening as an emerging capability in keeping teams nimble.

The most eyebrow-raising moment in the report is the fact that the spending on MarTech will exceed how much brands will be spending on staff salaries. This is because, with powerful MarTech solutions, internal staff will only be concentrating on strategy and management.

So, it does look like marketers are in-sync with Gartner’s findings. Tell us what you think at news@martech.com

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