The State of Marketing Budgets 2021

This year’s annual CMO Spend Survey polled 430 CMOs across North America and Europe, specifically the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France and Germany. These samples are from large organizations — we’re looking at organizations that have an annual revenue of over $500 million. But most of the responses to the survey actually are from organizations that sit above the $1 billion mark, in fact, a significant proportion of the respondents have revenue that is over $10 billion.

Gartner for Marketers provides tools to manage and fund growth. We can help you decide what to cut, where to invest and what to protect with our Strategic Cost Optimization resources

The annual CMO Spend Survey looks at the top-line marketing budget, and divides that budget up using three different views:

• Budget allocations across marketing’s major resources: people, media, agencies and technology
• Budget divisions across major channels 
• The programs and operational areas that marketing’s budget supports

The CMO Spend Survey allows you to benchmark your marketing spend to see how you stack up against your peers and competitors. You will get marketing spend trends and insight that will give you a look into where your peers are focusing to better benchmark, allocate spend, prioritize and build your marketing strategy and better prepare for marketing budget planning.

A marketing budget outlines the total money that an organization needs to spend on it’s marketing. This can include branding, paid advertising, email marketing, web content, marketing organization and martech solutions.

The State of Marketing Budgets 2021 provides details into the best way to benchmark your budget and can provide insight into how other marketers are budgeting, which channels they are allocating marketing budget to and how different industries are distributing their marketing budget.

This year’s CMO Spend Survey indicates that Martech spend makes up 26.6% of marketing budgets in 2021.