Gartner Marketing, based in Stamford, Connecticut has announced the results of its recent Digital Marketing survey which shows that companies plan to spend more on digital marketing next year.
Just over 50 percent of those surveyed said that they would be increasing their spending on digital marketing, using new technology to enhance the whole area of customer experience, with increased investment in software to buy advertising, called programmatic trading, heading the list.
Research Director at the company, Jake Sorofman, said that amount of money spent on customer experience is planned to be, on average, 18 percent of the total advertising budget, and is pretty consistent among all respondents to the survey. In fact, many companies feel that customer experience is the major area where they need to innovate, even ahead of new products.
Managing vice president, Yvonne Genovese, highlighted that according to CEOs, their number one priority was digital marketing and she went on to say that it was not surprising that over 60 percent of companies felt that it was justified to increase digital marketing budgets even if the funds had to come from somewhere else in the organization. And, while advertising still has the largest share of the digital marketing pie currently, next year mobile marketing is expected to compete for first place.
Laura McLellan, Gartner’s research president confirmed that the lines were continuing to blur between traditional and digital marketing, explaining that no longer should they be considered two separate entities. Nowadays, even sales budgets are being reduced as customers are being encouraged to move towards self-service purchasing.
The survey took place in July and August this year with 315 respondents from six different industries all with over $500 million in annual income. Respondents were located in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.