I nearly fell off my chair when I read the latest Gartner report on marketing spending.

According to their Gartner CMO Spend Survey* marketing technology (martech) budgets continue to increase, now accounting for a whopping 29% of the total marketing expense budget.

This is exactly the space we play in and validates our considerable investment in marketing operations technology.

The Gartner survey* polled more than 600 marketing leaders across the US & UK to understand their marketing priorities and budget allocations.

Martech is now the single largest area of investment in a CMO’s budget.

A key piece of martech is a Marketing Operations Platform (MOP). A MOP helps you manage multiple marketing projects by freeing you from spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains and into a scalable system that ensures projects are delivered on time, on budget, on brand, and prevents you from getting fined or sued.

They put order to the chaos by giving marketing departments a system to manage how things get done versus managing hundreds of projects haphazardly. As my CEO Tessa Court is fond of saying, “Just like sales teams need a CRM system to manage their world, modern marketing departments need a Marketing Operations Platform to manage content marketing processes.”

A robust MOP ticks the following boxes (see infographic below):

• Marketing Projects Management
• Marketing Calendars and Planners
• Workflow Approvals and Alert Notifications
• Digital Asset Management
• Brand Compliance
• Dashboard Reporting and Analytics

For more information on the value of a Marketing Operation Platform, read our Whitepaper: Transform Your Marketing Operations.

Other interesting findings from Gartner, include:

• Marketing budgets remain steady despite uncertain times ahead
• Advertising dominates the CMO multichannel budget
• Digital accounts for 25% of marketing investments
• 1 in 6 marketing dollars is spent on innovation
• CMOs value awareness more than ROI and market share
• Personalization has emerged as a strategically important marketing capability

The survey results – particularly regarding martech investment – made my day and proves we we are on the right track. Exciting times ahead.

*Gartner CMO Spend Survey.