Marketing spend has flattened out over the past two years, but budget allocations for digital channels are taking up a bigger piece of the pie. Many CMOs are using their budgets to make bigger investments in technology, especially analytics. To better understand how the industry will adapt in 2019, we’ve collected all the marketing spend statistics you need to know going into the new year:
According to data from Statista, the U.S. outspends all other countries on advertising, with the next highest country, China, not even spending half the amount.
- U.S.: $197.47 billion.
- China: $79.08 billion.
- Japan: $41.85 billion.
- UK: $24.21 billion.
- Germany: $22.74 billion.
- Brazil: $14.89 billion.
- South Korea: $12.13 billion.
- Australia: $12.02 billion.
- France: $11. 95 billion.
- Indonesia: $8.71 billion.
- Canada: $8.66 billion.
- India: $8.65 billion.
After hitting a peak in 2016, marketing budgets remained steady at 11.2 percent of revenue in 2018, according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019.
According to information from Marketing Charts, digital advertising in the U.S. is now a $30 billion larger market than TV advertising.
The retail industry allocates the highest percentage of total spend to advertising.
- Retail: 21.9%
- Automotive: 12.6%
- Financial services: 12.2%
- Telecom: 10.7%
- CPG & consumer products: 8.8%
- Travel: 8.0%
- Computing products and consumer electronics: 7.8%
- Media: 6.1%
- Entertainment: 5.1%
- Health and pharma: 2.6%
- Other: 4.3%
Per The CMO survey, companies that make more than 10 percent of sales online allocate 13 percent of their total budget to marketing, compared with companies without internet sales, which allocate 10.6 percent of their budgets to marketing.
Between Aug 2017 and Aug 2018, B2B product companies increased their marketing knowledge investments:
- Developing new marketing knowledge and capabilities: 8.6 percent.
- Marketing research and intelligence: 4.5 percent.
- Marketing consulting services: 6.1 percent.
- Marketing training: 2.9 percent.
- Over the same period, B2C product companies followed a similar pattern:
- Developing new marketing knowledge and capabilities: 6.6 percent.
- Marketing research and intelligence: 6.3 percent.
- Marketing consulting services: 6.3 percent.
- Marketing training: 3.7 percent.
In 2018, CMOs devoted more of their budgets to investment in marketing technologies than to labor costs, with martech spend rising to 29 percent of the average budget. Within this piece of the marketing pie, spend is evenly split between five areas:
- 21 percent: External services to develop, implement and integrate marketing applications.
- 17 percent: Cross-charges from internal IT.
- 21 percent: Infrastructure for marketing technology.
- 20 percent: On-premise marketing and/or analytics software applications.
- 20 percent: Marketing and/or analytics software as a service.
- 1 percent: Other.
The trend of shifting more marketing dollars to digital channels will continue into the foreseeable future, with The CMO Survey projecting spend on digital marketing to increase from 44 percent of marketing budgets to 54 percent by 2024.
Gartner’s report also revealed that UK marketers devote 11.8 percent of their budgets to digital display advertisements. Meanwhile, U.S. marketers allocate 7.3 percent to the same channel. Globally, marketers allocate 8.9 percent of their budgets to digital display ads and 5.3 percent to paid search advertising.
Globally, consumer product brands spend the most on digital display advertisements, allocating 10.5 percent of their budget.
Despite the smaller portion of investment, the search channel has shown substantial growth between 2017 and 2018. According to research from Magna, the three channels with the highest ad revenue growth are:
- Social media: 38 percent.
- Online video: 27 percent.
- Search: 18 percent.
Forward-thinking CMOs see the need for increased innovation. Not only are consumer demographics changing, but also buying habits. Gartner’s survey revealed that 63 percent of CMOs expect their innovation budget to increase in 2019.
In 2018, CMOs set aside 16 percent of their budgets for innovation.
Smart Insights reported that marketers rank content marketing as the top activity that will have the biggest impact on their business in the near future.
According to a report from Cision, global content marketing revenue will exceed $300 billion by 2019.
A survey from the Content Marketing Institute found that the most successful B2B marketers spend 40 percent of their total marketing budget on content marketing.
If trends continue, marketing spend in 2019 will look similar to spend in the preceding year, albeit with more emphasis on digital channels and technology investments. More organizations are realizing the substantial benefits of analytics and machine learning as tools to augment their paid, display and content marketing strategies.
Does your organization plan to make a big marketing move in the next year? Tell us about it in the comments below.
