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Nearly nine in ten CMOs and senior marketing executives (89 percent) plan to up their marketing investments in 2023—and 44 percent say that those increases will be “substantial.”
That’s the finding of the Matter Marketing Outlook Survey, which collected responses from more than 200 CMOs and marketing execs across sectors, including B2B technology, healthcare, retail, professional services and customer experience.
About two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said that public relations and social media would be top priorities when allocating their marketing budgets for next year. Marketing operations, analytics and mar tech were also deemed important, with 59 percent of respondents saying they plan to invest in those areas. Content marketing (50 percent) and video marketing (38 percent) followed, with such areas as internal communications (13 percent) and demand gen (11 percent) coming far down the list.
When asked what areas have resulted in the highest ROI over the past year, respondents once again put public relations and social media (69 percent) in the top spot, followed by content marketing (49 percent) and video marketing (39 percent).
Citing data from KPMG, which indicate 80 percent of CEOs think there will be a recession in 2023, Matter’s survey asked respondents what they think will be the biggest challenges facing their departments over the next year. Almost a third (31 percent) said that measuring marketing performance looks to be a big hurdle, with almost the same number (30 percent) citing economic uncertainty.
The 48 percent of respondents who say they cut their marketing investments in 2020-21 seem for the most part to have changed their minds, with 90 percent of them now planning to increase their marketing investments for next year. That may be at least partly due to the results experienced by the 34 percent who raised their marketing expenditures over that period. More than seven out of 10 say they experienced “substantial or moderate growth.”
Matter’s survey was fielded on Sept. 29 and 30.
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