Since early May 2020, ClickZ has been asking it’s readers to contribute to an ongoing reader survey. This survey reviews key buying habits and insights specifically related to marketing technology and more generally how marketing budgets are changing.
In unprecedented times it is hard to predict trends, so we hope these charts can be used as a way to tell the story of what has happened and used as a reference point as we continue to see rapid change in our industry.
The data below will be most useful to marketers and senior leaders within Marketing Technology companies as well as brand-side marketers looking to see how other marketers are budgeting and purchasing marketing technology.
It is important to note that the charts below are displayed using a triangular 7 day moving point average.
Marketing budgets increase from a low in June, but we see a slight decrease at the end of August
First up we review how marketing budgets are changing over time. As you can see we experienced a huge change mid-June with the proportion of marketers increasing their budgets declining significantly and the proportion increasing and then improving.
This decline then stabilizes throughout the majority of August with another dip towards the end.
Marketers continue to spend on marketing technology with 29% of marketing budgets being allocated to Tech
Although we have seen overall marketing budgets fluctuate considerably, the proportion spent on Marketing Technology has seen less drastic changes.
We see an average from the beginning of May of 38% with a high of 47% and a low of 27% in early June.
Marketers are evaluating or interested in purchasing Content & Experience, Advertising & Promotion, and Commerce & Sales technologies
Whilst we appreciate this is a harder chart to interpret, this is actually one of our favorites as it not only shows the interest in a technology category but also infers the change in focus and problems that marketers are looking to solve.
Content & Experience (SEO, Content Marketing, Email Marketing etc.) is the red line and as you can see has consistently been in high demand.
Data has also been in demand and has two of the biggest peaks on the chart. When looking at the end of August Advertising & Promotion (Video, Social, Search and Mobile marketing etc.) took the second spot as being the category of technology that marketers are most looking to evaluate or purchase right now.
Diving deeper into the top technology sub-categories in these categories we see the following.
SEO tools top the list in the Content & Experience category of the types of technology they are looking to evaluate or purchase right now
Within Content & Experience we see that SEO, Email and Content Marketing take the top 3 spots when we take a snapshot of the data from the end of August.
Search & Social Advertising top the Advertising & Promotion category with almost 25% followed by Mobile Advertising
Next up if we deep-dive into the second most sought after category, we see that Search & Social Advertising takes the top spot with almost 25% of respondents saying that are looking to evaluate or purchase right now.
We tracked over $400 million of funding in Marketing Technology companies in August
Finally, our team has seen over $400 million of funding in marketing technologies in August alone.
This includes Gong.io a revenue intelligence platform that received $200 million on august 12, Yotpo a commerce marketing cloud who received $79 million and Movable Ink an email, web and display company who raised $30 million.
Whilst we are slightly late in getting our August review out of the door, we will be publishing our new Intelligence reports monthly with the next one coming out the first week of October to review activity in September.
To download the full report you can access on this site.