According to a survey of more than 350 B2B tech companies across North America and Europe, conducted by Spiceworks, almost 80 percent marketers at technology companies expect their budgets to increase or remain the same this year.
Almost 37% are looking at an increase, and among those, more than half – 51% are looking forward to an increased priority on marketing as a driving factor. This clearly indicates that the marketing function is now being vested with more responsibility for overall growth. The CMOs are seeing their role as having increased in importance significantly.
The expansion in marketing budgets is driven by factors such as plans for customer expansion (48%), increased company revenue (45%) and product expansion (42%).
Another significant change is that in 2019, a large part of the budget is allocated to paid media and events. Almost one-third (30%) is being allocated to paid media. Breaking this down a bit further, paid search is receiving the largest portion of paid media budgets followed by social media marketing. Events take up an estimated 22% share of spending this year the next-largest percentage of marketing budgets, since experience says, they are seen as a key way to drive sales revenue.
With becoming increasingly important even within areas such as event marketing, it is expected to be allocated a similar portion of the budget (21%) as events, per the Spiceworks research. Technology is increasingly being used more frequently to enhance exhibitions and corporate events. To this effect, more than half the respondents and organizations surveyed said that they have increased their budget in this category from last year, and it stands at 51% for 2019.
Regionally, almost 50% of all North American organizations plan on increasing their budget compared to 39% of organizations in Europe. This could be due to an impact from both increased regulation (e.g. GDPR) and political uncertainty in the region.
