Brand building or customer relationships? See what marketing leaders’ priorities are for the coming years.
Marketing leaders are shifting their priorities as the pandemic eases. The CMO Survey’s “Marketing in the Post-COVID Era” study, conducted with more than 270 American marketing leaders, analyzes how professionals were performing at the beginning of the pandemic and what their priorities are now. Check out the data:
Changes over the years
At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the main concern of marketing professionals was digitalization and customer retention. Therefore, during the months that followed with greater social isolation, investments were directed towards customer relationship management.
However, priorities are now different. Since August of last year, leaders have been focusing on increasing investment in marketing actions focused on brand building. According to the study, the highest singapore whatsapp data projection for this priority was in the first half of this year (+11.8%), but the expectation is that brand building will continue to outperform customer engagement (+9.6%), even though it is below the first period analyzed.
In addition to these budget changes, expectations regarding CRM spending also fell significantly, from 9.5% of investments to 6.8%.
The Negative Impact of Inflation on Marketing Budgets
Projections of strengthening investment in brand building are something that have already been discussed in other studies in B2B industries and are now expanding to B2C companies.
Much of this drive to increase brand importance is related to inflationary pressures experienced around the world. Some professionals interviewed report that these investments are driven by inflation and rising prices.
42% of professionals said they are reducing spending levels, while only 17% said they are increasing it. The positive point is that, despite the decrease in investment, companies are more aware of the value of marketing in business.
72% of companies say that the role of marketing increased in the previous year, and the drop for this year was only 4 percentage points (68%). This shows that companies are increasingly seeing marketing as a fundamental part of business.