Marketing budgets decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, but marketing executives are not seeing the recovery they expected, according to a July 14 report from Gartner.
For its "CMO Strategic Priorities Survey 2020-2021," Gartner surveyed marketing executives from 400 companies.
Five takeaways:
- The proportion of company revenue allocated to marketing was almost cut in half, decreasing from about 11 percent in 2020 to 6 percent in 2021. This is the lowest proportion of company revenue to market budget in the history of the survey.
- In healthcare, marketing budgets fell from 9.9 percent in 2020 to 7.2 percent in 2021.
- In all nine industries analyzed, none of them had a marketing budget that recovered.
- Nearly a third (29 percent) of respondents said work previously carried out by advertising agencies has moved in-house in the last 12 months.
- Pure-play digital channel investments account for 72 percent of the marketing budget, while offline advertising accounted for 9 percent of the marketing budget.