How CMOs Are Spending Their Marketing Budget – and What It Means for You

The CMO Spend Survey is an annual survey to understand the marketing organization's strategic priorities and budget allocations every year. In 2022, the research was conducted online among 405 respondents, who were required to have involvement in decisions pertaining to setting or influencing marketing strategy and planning, as well as have involvement in aligning marketing budget/resources. Seventy-four percent of the respondents came from organizations with $1 billion or more in annual revenue. The respondents came from a variety of industries: financial services, tech products, manufacturing and consumer products to name a few.

Gartner for Marketers provides tools to manage and fund growth. We can help you decide what to cut, where to invest and what to protect with our Strategic Cost Optimization resources

The annual State of Marketing Budget and Strategy research looks at the top-line marketing budget, and highlights:

• Data that can help CMOs and marketing leaders like you to benchmark their marketing budget with industry and peers
• How your marketing channel spending priorities measure up against respondents to this year’s survey.
• The programs and operational areas that marketing’s budget supports
• Budget allocations across marketing’s major resources: people, media, agencies and technology

The CMO Spend Survey allows you to benchmark your marketing spend to see how you stack up against your peers and competitors. You will get marketing spend trends and insight that will give you a look into where your peers are focusing to better benchmark, allocate spend, prioritize and build your marketing strategy and better prepare for marketing budget planning.

A marketing budget outlines the total money that an organization needs to spend on it’s marketing. This can include branding, paid advertising, email marketing, web content, marketing organization and martech solutions.

The State of Marketing Budgets Survey 2022 reports that budgets have  recovered somewhat, with the average across industries increasing from 6.4% of company revenue to 9.5%. While this represents a significant climb-back, budgets still lag behind prepandemic levels - the average budget between 2018 and 2020 was 10.9%.  Your marketing budget depends on your industry- with average marketing spending increasing across almost all of the industries surveyed, with some significant variances. Check out the research for more information.

The latest CMO Spend Survey 2022 highlights that just as Western markets are released from COVID-19 restrictions, a plethora of geopolitical, cultural and fiscal challenges emerge And this is not the new normal that the CMOs were promised. The survey captures the priorities of CMOs as they grapple with a range of macroenvironmental, social and political realities.