Report: Marketers to Spend Less on Customer Initiatives as Budgets Fall

2 weeks agoLast Updated: 30/05/2023

533 1 minute read

Although marketers have shifted their focus to initiatives, such as the customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM), new research suggests that they will invest less in these areas in the coming months. This comes as they look towards maintaining their present success, rather than forecasting future outcomes.

The results of The CMO Survey for March 2023 were recently published by Deloitte, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and the American Marketing Association. Statistics derived from the survey indicated that marketing spend on brand building, the customer experience, and CRM is projected to fall by about 50%, compared to data from last year’s report. This comes as marketing budgets as a percentage of company budgets fell to 12.3%, on average, from 11.8% in February 2022.

The majority of marketers (69.9%) now spend most of their time managing the present, rather than just 30.1% who claim they are focused on the future. This is an increase from the 64.3% who stated that they were focused on managing the present back in February 2022.

Marketers Remain Dedicated to Investing in Automation Solutions

Marketers are now spending less on initiatives, such as CRM, but previous research indicates that they are still dedicated to investing in other areas, such as automation.

Ascend2 released “The State of Marketing Automation” report, and data suggested that most marketers (51%) are now geared toward moderately increasing their marketing automation budget within the next year. Approximately 30% stated that their investment in this area will at least remain the same, and 8% claim it will rise significantly over the next 12 months.

Most respondents claim that they use marketing automation tools for social media management (29%), paid advertising (29%), and email marketing (28%).