CMOs allocated 3.24 percent of revenue to technology spending for 2016, Gartner analyst Jake Sorofman wrote in his blog. It is very close to the 3.4 percent of revenue CIOs earmark for IT.
He was referring to Gartner’s soon-to-be-published annual CMO spend survey.
According to Sorofman, this trend is an indication that marketing technology is now garnering investment nearly equivalent to the core systems that run the business.
He explains that this is because businesses consider marketing technology one among core systems.
Customer preferences and behaviors have changed and buying journeys are increasingly self-directed and digitally led.
Which means that, more than ever, multichannel marketing is among the most critical customer-facing, revenue-generating functions.
Today, most CMOs own or share profit and loss responsibility. Many CMOs are responsible for a digital commerce channel.
And while customer experience very much remains a team sport, marketing often funds these cross-functional CX initiatives, sets the strategy, and designs the desired-state experience itself—and, in many organizations, owns and controls a growing preponderance of customer touchpoints.
Sorofman says this isn’t meant to be about marketing exceptionalism. “And I’m not trying to make the case for how marketing technology will eat enterprise IT. That’s not the point.”
The point is that as growth continues to be the top mandate and customer experience emerges as the competitive battlefield, CMOs are taking on ever more responsibility.
And as digital marketing becomes marketing in a digital world, technology is woven into virtually every planning assumption.
All of this is driving more and more spending on marketing technology as the engine for driving profitable growth.
