New research from B2B precision demand marketing firm Integrate reveals insights on how marketers are responding to economic headwinds, revealing that that nearly 60 percent of B2B marketers report current budgets being cut or staying flat—and two-thirds of marketers are expected to accomplish the same or more with fewer resources.
Nevertheless, the firm’s new State of B2B Marketing Budgets 2022 report, conducted with research and advisory firm Demand Metric, finds that despite those challenges, 80 percent report having a neutral to optimistic outlook for 2023.
“B2B marketing has always been hard, but today, marketers are tasked with the impossible: They’re expected to do more with less,” said Colby Cavanaugh, SVP of marketing at Integrate, in a news release. “There’s never been a better time to invest in greater precision, reduce redundancies, and focus on adopting a more powerful, buyer-driven, cross-channel Precision Demand Marketing approach to maximize your marketing efforts.”
The report found that the leading driving forces behind marketing budget shifts were from inflation and economic recession. As a result, 21 percent of respondents reported their budget being cut mid-year and one-third of B2B marketers report less staff this year than last.
When it comes to marketing approaches, the tides have changed for marketers, with only 27 percent reporting that account-based experience marketing is a key part of their strategy. Today, marketers are primarily focused the trifecta of:
- a buyer-driven & cross-channel strategy (54 percent)
- an always-on approach (43 percent)
- traditional demand gen (43 percent)
To calibrate to current market shifts, marketers plan to invest the most in digital marketing (48 percent), content creation (47 percent), and customer marketing 46 percent). Conversely, they will plan to spend less on ABM (41 percent), field or event marketing (35 percent), and communications (34 percent).
While respondents were nearly evenly split on their satisfaction with their current MarTech stack, almost 95 percent of respondents report some redundancies in their stack.
“These results suggest that there is a great deal of opportunity for B2B marketers to be more efficient and effective in everything from their strategies to their tech stack,” said John Follett, co-founder, CXO & head of research at Demand Metric, in the release. “Marketers may be overwhelmingly optimistic for 2023, but in order to succeed in the months ahead, they need to be prepared to act with greater precision and drive tangible, repeatable revenue results that can scale.”
Download the full report here.
The report was fielded in September 2022 to over 500 respondents across the U.S. and UK.
