In the B2B marketing space, 70% of marketing executives expect digital marketing budgets to increase slightly or significantly this year. While 19% of marketers in general expect a significant increase, 24% of executives expect budgets to significantly grow.
While 79% expect to utilize AI tools in their marketing strategies, and 67% are overall positive about the impact of AI, a non-negligible 16% are apprehensive; 12% are indifferent. Personalization and content generation lead the use cases.
April 2023 state of B2B digital. These findings come from a new report by B2B research firm Ascend2 in association with the digital agency Wpromote. They interviewed 348 marketing professionals in the U.S. in April of this year.
The top challenges they face this year are:
- Improving customer experience.
- Proving ROI.
- Generating quality leads.
- Creating quality content.
- Aligning marketing and sales.
Why we care. Those challenges do seem perennial. But what’s striking about this report is the robust belief that B2B marketing organizations will have more to spend on digital initiatives despite economic headwinds.
This is in slight contrast to the views of a similar-sized sample expressed in Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, where between 12% and 26% of those interviewed expected to decrease spending in specific digital channels. Two differences: The Gartner sample was split evenly between B2B and B2C marketers; it also incorporated findings from Canada and Europe.
Dig deeper: Marketers under pressure to cut martech spend
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About the author
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.
He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.
Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
