Marketers invest in better customer experience and measurability
The most important results of the study:
- Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important for investments: 73% of respondents stated that they want to increase their spending on digital marketing (previous year: 77%). However, only 52% of respondents intend to increase their overall marketing budget - a decrease of 11% compared to the previous year.- Marketers invest primarily in better customer experiences: Marketers are primarily investing in optimizing the customer experience. Budgets are particularly likely to be increased in the areas of A/B tests and multivariate tests (46%), conversion and optimization (40%) and marketing analytics (36%).- Integration of digital technologies into marketing not yet successful: Only around a third (35%) of respondents stated that they hardly differentiate between the marketing budgets for digital and conventional marketing.- Offline marketing is alive and well: Despite the significant change in consumer behaviour due to digitalization, conventional advertising still has a high value for marketers. As in 2015, the majority of respondents (46%) stated that they would not change their budget for conventional marketing. One reason for this could be that there are definitive measurement methods for these channels that have been tried and tested. This also makes it easier to justify budgets for corresponding activities.- Reliable and transparent performance measurement is the measure of all things: Reliable measurability of marketing activities via certain channels continues to play a decisive role in determining where budgets are allocated. For example, marketing automation, personalization and mobile advertising are still relatively neglected when it comes to investments - the benefits are simply not yet sufficiently verifiable in the eyes of decision-makers.- Short-term ROI expectation beats long-term strategyCompanies are investing in digital marketing as a matter of principle, which opens up new prospects in the long term, but are already expecting rising revenues and profits in the short term.- Continued pressure on CMOs to justify themselves: At board and management level, the focus is still on financial figures and not on the customer. On the one hand, this reduces the willingness to provide their own budgets for marketing experiments (35% compared to 46% in the previous year). Secondly, this year only 57% of marketing managers surveyed stated that it had become easier to obtain the support of management to increase digital marketing budgets - a drop of 14 percentage points to 57%.
Recommendations for marketing decision-makers:
- Speaking in the "language of the Management BoardCommunication at board level is usually focused on figures and results. CMOs should actively counter this and use measurements, reports and analyses to document trends as well as successes and generate willingness to invest in marketing.- Optimize results across channels: Conventional advertising continues to reach many users; marketing decision-makers should therefore focus less on the distinction between digital and conventional and more on the results when addressing customers. When making decisions about marketing budgets, both areas must therefore be taken into account.- Be more innovative and reserve budgets for experiments: Consumer behavior changes very quickly; those who do not follow their existing and potential customers fast enough (or even better: stay ahead) will quickly fall behind. However, only 35 % of the companies surveyed in the study set aside a budget for experimentation. However, an activity in an area where there is no competition yet can be very lucrative; the willingness to experiment in marketing should therefore be increased.
