Do the math, says Laura McLellan, Research VP in Gartner’s Marketing Leaders research group. Marketing budgets are greater than IT budgets, and growing—whereas IT budgets are fairly flat.
“Marketing is driven by growth…which means marketers need to take risks,” McLellan says, adding that in today’s increasingly digital world marketing needs to experiment or be left behind. “This means failing early and often, a much different approach than IT.” So it’s no surprise that by 2017 marketing departments will spend more on technology tools and services than their IT brethren, according to Gartner. It’s also no surprise that more than 25% of companies will have a chief digital officer by 2015, Gartner predicts.
Another driver of marketing budget increases? Today’s focus on customer engagement requires additional spending, McLellan notes. Existing e-commerce businesses can no longer support current customer demands; companies need to revamp their sites or use digital as a gateway until they can, she says. For some businesses meeting customers’ expectations means create a new website from scratch, built 100% around the customer viewpoint—not around the technology.
In this podcast McLellan goes into details on these trends, giving a sneak peek into her keynote session at the upcoming Marketing&Tech Partnership Summit on June 20 in San Jose.
