In the 2018 “State of the CIO Survey,” CIO magazine found that only 42% of survey respondents had budget earmarks specifically for marketing technology product and service investments. While 42% seems high, it also means that over half of the respondents were notbudgeting for technology.
So, what are types of tech are marketing departments spending their money on? A broad range of marketing professionals were asked for their input on this question. Here’s what they said:
- Marketing automation. Who doesn’t want to work faster and have an easier time doing it? Today’s technology offers tools that can perform many tasks for humans, leading to leaner, more efficient marketing operations. However, you don’t want to swap managing people for managing tools. An organization should choose only the tools that are really needed and that are a good fit for the organization from the perspectives of complexity, budget, organization size and expertise. One tool mentioned by several marketing pros was Hubspot – categorized as both an “inbound marketing tool” and a general marketing automation tool.
- Chatbots. Chatbots are being used more and more in various digital settings. They can be valuable in low-level customer interaction and can even be used to automate that process altogether. As voice recognition technology improves, chatbots will become more valuable for customer interaction.
- CRM and more. CRM is used almost universally by marketers. Extended technologies that expand on the basic CRM functions are being invested in by B2B organizations. These extended technologies work to link, measure and optimize all stages of the customer journey, and allow more availability for marketing to serve and upsell existing clients.
- SEO. Because the goal of SEO strategy is to boost an organization’s presence in organic web searches, this function has typically fallen to marketers. However, SEO can be complicated, from a tech perspective, so SEO software can be helpful to marketers by simplifying the task.
- Online advertising. Regardless of how an organization chooses to advertise online, technology is involved to some degree.
- Social media monitoring. Not only should an organization monitor its own social media performance, it should also see what the competition is doing. There are many options for social media monitoring technology, including reputation management tools.
- Business intelligence. Every marketer knows there are tons of data available, but the question is how to use it. Tools for data mining, data warehousing and business intelligence are very important for helping to make sense of all that data, and marketers are willing to pay for it.