Whether you’ve got more money in the marketing budget or not, hold onto that scrappy and creative mentality to rebuild momentum
Over the last couple of years, “marketing teams had to be scrappy and creative with their strategies or curtail their ambitions.” Marketing simply hasn’t had the budget to do anything else.
I like to think of it as the greatest experiment in marketing measurement ever. Frustrated by marketing’s inability to connect output to revenue, B2B tech companies, especially those backed by private capital, simply turned marketing off.
What happened next was predictable to anyone with a grain of marketing experience. The pipeline slimmed. Renewals dipped. Growth stalled. And marketing lost all forward motion.
That seems to be changing as businesses come to their senses, according to a survey of CMOs by CMSWire. The trade publication polled 515 marketing leaders who are 100% “responsible for leading all or parts of their organization’s marketing function.”
Some 67% of respondents said the budget has increased over the last year. This includes about one in four (23%) who indicated their budget grew “significantly.”
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The optimistic outlook for marketing budgets looks solid moving forward as well. More than eight in 10 respondents (84%) said they expect their marketing budget to increase next year too.
There are two notable caveats in the findings. First, marketing teams that work for larger businesses, defined in this report as those with 1,000 or more employees, are more likely to see more budget:
“While 74% of leaders at large organizations say their budget has increased slightly or significantly in the past year, only 61% of leaders at smaller organizations said the same.”
Secondly, those who lead marketing teams with more sophisticated technology systems are much more likely to see a bump in budget this year and next.
This makes sense given the same report found that the top trend affecting marketing is a “need to integrate data from multiple sources” according to 53% of respondents. I would imagine those teams experiencing budget rebounds are solving this problem.
Mixed bag of survey results on marketing budgets
Predicting where marketing budgets are headed is a bit like the economy at the moment. It’s a mixed bag of indicators. Some show improvement while others are less sanguine.
For example, a recent survey of 402 CMOs by Gartner found “marketing budgets for 2025 remain flat at 7.7% of overall company revenue.”
Meanwhile, The CMO Survey by Duke’s Fuqua School of Business showed as a percentage of company revenue, marketing budgets rose to 9.4% – up from 7.7% last fall – across all business types.
Whether you’ve got more money in the marketing purse or not, my suggestion is to hold onto that “scrappy and creative” mentality. Marketing is a game of momentum, and in my experience, a marketing culture that embraces scrappy has a far better chance of rebuilding momentum – with or without a budget boost.
The report is available here: The State of the CMO: Executive Summary
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Image credit: Google Gemini and respective studies
