Spending on Marketing Analytics

March 28, 2012

I added a special section focusing on marketing analytics to the February 2012 issue of The CMO Survey. With all the talk about “big data” and the billions of dollars companies appear to pouring into capturing, processing, and leverage customer data, I thought it would be a good idea to examine where companies are on a few key issues and also where they expect to be over time on this strategic investment.

I asked top marketers to report what percentage of their marketing budgets they spend on marketing analytics. I think this is a reasonable request given that 70% of all top marketers state that the marketing analytics group reports to them. Results indicate that companies currently spend an average of 5.7% of their marketing budgets on marketing analytics and that this number is expected to grow to 9.1% in the next three years. This 60% increase represents a sizable shift. To put it in perspective, marketing budgets overall have grown 8.3% over the last two years. This growth varies by company size and industry sector. Looking at Table 1, we can see that, in general, current marketing analytic spending levels and expected growth levels correlate with company size (measured as revenues). There is a trough near the middle for companies between $500M-$999M, but otherwise the relationship is positive and significant. Examining sector differences in Table 2, we see that services companies, overall, spend more on marketing analytics now and will remain ahead of product companies in the next three years. From these figures, service companies appear to understand the “big data” opportunity and believe they can leverage it to create more value for their customers.

Table 1. Spending on Marketing Analytics by Company Size (in sales revenues)

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