New report finds the majority of senior marketers have their own IT budgets for purchases related to the marketing function
Nine out of 10 Australia and New Zealand senior marketers are making purchasing decisions on technology products and services for their function, a new report claims.
According to Telsyte’s Australian and New Zealand Digital Marketer Study 2015, 91 per cent of the 255 CMOs and marketers surveyed across large organisations are actively purchasing technology to suite their requirements. In fact, 70 per cent of marketers are mostly use their own budget to source IT.
Web analytics or split testing software is the most common purchase at 39 per cent. CRM purchases are also very common, at 38 per cent, and 36 per cent are procuring big data analytics for customer transaction analysis.
Telsyte said the results reflected the rapid change in the role of the CMO, which has been massively disrupted as a result of digitisation, the availability of cloud-based software and computing, and increasing demand for data-driven, actionable customer insights.
“Marketing’s transformation has moved on from just buying digital advertising to building scalable approaches that provide a single view of the customer, support meaningful measurement, and enable real-time decision-making,” said Telsyte analyst and report author, Steven Noble.
“Marketing measurement and customer-centricity are the left and right legs of digital transformation. This is why Web analytics and CRM are the types of applications marketers are mostly likely to buy.”
Just over half of respondents said they’re buying IT directly because they need flexibility (57 per cent). Across the board, 45 per cent said they are investing in IT because they knew more than the IT department about their own needs.
The report also found marketers that buy their own IT are more likely to have the technology products they need. Eight-four per cent of those that mostly use marketing’s own budget agree or strongly agree that “our marketing function has the technology it needs to be effective”, compared with 71 per cent of those mostly using IT’s budget to buy IT.
Despite the fact that marketers are highly satisfied with their technology purchases, IT leaders are concerned, Telsyte. Noting a separate and recent survey of 336 CIO and ICT leaders that have lines of business that purchase IT products and services, 36 per cent claimed their organisations had experienced problems.
Top issues included integration requirements (36 per cent), inconsistent technology selection (33 per cent) and security (32 per cent).
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