$122 Billion: The Marketing Technology and Services Investment Sticker Shock
At $90 billion today and growing to $122 billion by 2022, CMOs are pouring budgets into investments which align their organization’s operations with greater customer and experience focus. Planning and budgeting for the technology and services investments supporting these goals stands as a critical task for CMOs and will only get harder in the future.
To shine a light on these expanding Martech and Services investments, Drew Green and I recently completed a comprehensive US forecast of these markets plagued by opacity, fragmentation, and overrun by vendor capability overlap. Rather than overwhelm with minutia, we focused on the big picture. We aligned our categorization of disparate offerings into buckets a CMO could reasonably use to understand and guide their investment decisions in the aggregate.
Martech will grow at nearly 10% compound annual growth over the next five years. CMOs have a raft of factors pulling them to divert funds from working to non-working budgets and increasingly choose technology over media for incremental spend. For instance, over the next five years, expect funding experiences to dominate marketing priorities; artificial intelligence to expand as a solution for automating resource intensive tasks; and continuous development (particularly to advance mobile capabilities) in order to stay in front of demanding customers.
In comparison, services investments will only rise at a modest 3% compound growth rate. But don’t assume slower growth means a stable services market. Traditional agency players and consulting firms are already jostling for dominance. Their competition will soon include services arms of large marketing cloud tech vendors too.
See the full report to plan your own marketing budgets and for cooperative tips on managing tech budgets with your CIO. See also two recently completed reports by our colleagues profiling 20 Martech and 11 Adtech for some specifics around vendor capabilities as you work through your Martech and Services investments.
Written with Drew Green, Researcher.