CMO Study Finds More Money, Same Old Problems

The Gartner 2022 CMO Spend and Strategy survey finds a big increase in marketing budgets, optimistic CMOs, and a rebound in offline channel spending (though digital still dominates). Yet CMOs also revealed an ongoing challenge: Their teams lack the resources to deliver on their marketing strategies. Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute explains where the resource gap hurts the most and what to make of it.

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(Aired: June 3, 2022)

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Hello everybody, Robert Rose here with the news. It’s what’s new and what’s important in the world of Content Marketing. It’s the news you need to lead in the practice of Content marketing and content strategy.

And for the best in best practices – you can always go to contentmarketinginstitute.com.

Let’s talk about the CMO.

Last week, industry analyst firm Gartner announced the launch of its 2022 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey.

The headline? Well, despite that gnawing feeling of awfulness in the world and uncertain economic conditions at the moment, most CMOs are holding on to a belief that their own outlook is pretty positive.

Seventy percent of the respondents to this year’s study said their budgets had increased this last year. According to the survey, it was quite a bounce back. In 2021, marketing budgets as a percentage of total revenue were 6.4%. That number is back up to 9.5% in 2022.

That’s still short of the 10.9% average for 2019 to 2020, but nonetheless a signal that strong marketing efforts are underway.

The increase happened across just about every industry but was especially notable in travel and hospitality, media, manufacturing, financial services, tech products, and IT and business services. I would call out how many of those are B2B industries.

When the study looked at the biggest gaps in execution, no surprise that talent acquisition came up. But, interestingly, marketing data and analytics, followed by customer understanding, experience management, and marketing technology.

Related: Your Content Analytics Are Meaningless Unless You Have This [Rose-Colored Glasses]

Our take: This report aligns with our B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022 research. We, too, see content practitioners struggling with measurement, understanding the real needs of audiences and customers when it comes to content-driven experiences and the technology that can help facilitate them.

But our forecast for the second half of this year is that it’s likely to be turbulent coming into election season with continued geopolitical and pandemic-related disruptions.

Despite CMOs feeling sanguine about their budgets, we expect they’ll be looking for efficiency. As a result, efficient, effective content strategies that promise to do more with less will be the winning approaches for the remainder of 2022.

The Gartner research illustrates that the heart of solving every one of those CMO capabilities gaps is a team that can deliver the fuel – the content strategy – to get them through. There’s never been a more important time to figure out how great content becomes the engine of growth in your business’ marketing strategy.

Related: Building a Content Strategy? Watch Out for That Second Step

And that’s three minutes of the news you need to lead in content marketing. I’m Robert Rose. Remember, it’s your story. Tell it well. I’ll see you next week.