I recently read an article in Forbes Right Now by Lisa Arthur, that quoted Gartner's statistics that CMOs will be outspending CIOs on IT in the next 5 years. I agree with her premise, but I would say, that not only do CMOs spend on IT but they will spend on Big Data as well.
Why? ‘cos everything is on-line now and you have a small window to use it or lose it for competitive advantage. It’s the new way to understand and address your market. It has started already – Marketing technology budgets are growing faster than IT (see Gartner numbers below), investments in social mining tools up, and all of this data being stored needs to be accessed and analyzed for implications and trends in business.
These companies have a head start as they start to learn and educate their clients to interact on-line.
Now CMOs want to know more than they can get from Marketing Automation Software. They want to pull in Big Data Analytics for other business metrics. There are new Integrated Software Vendors that specialize in Marketing Analytics that are making Actian's Vectorwise, a fast (300 times faster than the competition) and low-cost analytical database, part of their core offerings. The rest of us have to move or be left behind.
Even today, spending for high tech Marketing is greater than spending by IT at a 2-to-1 ratio.
Gartner statistics that back up this statement:
• 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were almost three times as high (10 percent) as IT budgets (3.6 percent).
• 2012 IT budgets are expected to grow 4.7 percent, while all marketing budgets, in general, are predicted to grow 9 percent, and high tech marketing budgets, more specifically, are expected to increase 11 percent.
• On average, nearly one-third (30 percent) of named marketing-related technology and services is bought by marketing already. What’s more, marketing now influences almost half of all purchases
I agree with the Author's premise that "It's no longer Marketing that drives business growth it's digital marketing...".
Now with Social Media aggregators, tweet aggregators, and marketing automation software being used to build brand awareness for all types of companies, and the fact that customers increasingly want to use the internet to shop, research, and often buy goods and services, all their point-of-contact online data has become available to CMOs.
Marketing encompasses the entire customer experience. Each online customer’s preferences are recorded through their choices of navigation and eventual decision to purchase or not purchase at point of contact recorded by Marketing Automation Software. We can capture the number of times it takes the customer coming back to the site before they purchase, which campaigns they have responded to, and which product information they found interesting enough to download.
By using low-cost-high-speed analytical database to tap into all that stored data, often in the billions of transactions, CMO’s can analyze the data in order to figure out for B2B which target segments prefer which products, how profitable those products, services, or customers are for the company, at what price point they are able to sell how many units, or whatever parameters CMO’s want to use to filter.
It used to be just companies with high transactions or high volumes of data like Retail, Telco, Airlines, Banking, and Revenue tracking like the IRS that took advantage of high-speed analytical databases to get answers to market-based questions.
But now with reduced costs, implementation and hardware requirements for an analytical database, all verticals are able to make the leap to sophisticated analytics obtained through automated marketing software and cross reference it with big data; Using Intel's new Xeon5 high-speed processor, Vectorwise, ISVs and a whole host of Biz Intelligence Apps designed to answer those questions in real-time.
CMOs can have the information they need in seconds to decide which product lines or campaigns to kill or duplicate based on profitability, not assumptions.
Yes, I agree with the Forbe's writer that CMOs are the Chief Customers for IT spending for Inbound Marketing, but would say that they will also be Chief Customers for Big Data in the near future.
Comments? Do you agree with my prediction? Do you see this trend? Disagree?
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