CMO's budgets will jump 12.3% this year despite efficiency drives and GDPR headwinds
Despite concerns over the impact of GDPR and the real value of their digital media buys, US chief marketing officers are set to up their investment in digital to the tune of 12.3% over the next 12 months.
Digital currently takes up a 44% share of marketers' budgets, but that's expected to reach 54% in the next five years
The figure comes from the biannual CMO survey, which polled 324 top marketing executives on their current spend, and their plans for the year ahead.
Digital currently takes up a 44% share of marketers' budgets, but that's expected to reach 54% in the next five years, according to the report.
The findings indicate that this step change will be driven in large part by social media spend, which has benefited from the fastest growth over the past year since the survey began.
As things stand brands allocate 13.8% of their marketing budgets to social media but this is expected to reach 16.3% within the next year and 22.9% within five years. Other findings showed that mobile now boasts a 9.4% slice of marketing budgets, a proportion which is forecast to treble within three years.
Writing in Forbes Christine Moorman, founder and director of The CMO Survey said: “… although firms are spending more on social and mobile, there has been no lift in the contributions of these expenditures to company performance. It’s time to build a sustainable engine for converting digital investments into digital bottom line performance.
“It may be time to shake up these knowledge acquisition strategies if the current ‘build’ strategy doesn’t pay off soon!”
Despite the buoyant outlook for digital, marketers are cautious of where they source data amid the introduction of tighter data protection regulations.
While 31.3% of marketers reported currently using customer data from third-party aggregators over the last two years, that's set to fall to 29.7% in the next two years.
However, just 10% of businesses said they were ‘very worried’ about the use of online or third-party customer data.