As B2B companies pour money into the systems and technologies needed to transform their marketing operations into truly global digital performance engines, we will continue to see a steady rise in marketing spend as chief marketing officers leverage their new capabilities and ability to drive (and measure) return on investment on an unprecedented scale. Because of the marketplace’s overall digital transformation, B2B CMOs are now in a better position to argue for more ad spend.

Last week, eMarketer announced its first B2B digital advertising forecast, predicting the space will total $4.6 billion in 2018, up 13 percent from this year’s projected total of $4.07 billion. What’s more, when comparing next year’s forecast versus 2013, B2B digital ad budgets will have grown by 111 percent in just five years.

The growth figures for B2B media spend actually understate the share of corporate budgets going into B2B marketing activities if you consider the material technology investments that companies are making to drive performance and efficiency from their ad spends. This investment in digital transformation of the end-to-end B2B marketing stack is allowing deeper insights, better targeting and overall efficiency in driving engagement, leads and actions.

About 40% of survey respondents expect budget for traditional advertising to decrease.

We have also worked with marketers and agency leaders to identify where the knowledge and capabilities gaps exist.

1. Do you know all the key technology providers in your marketing and advertising tech stack and the basis on which they are engaged? Do you understand the cost drivers?
2. Have you assessed the technology skills gaps in your organisations and do you have visibility over what skills you are likely to need this time next year that you currently do not possess?
3. Do you know which agencies are responsible for you adtech solutions?
4. Do you know who owns the data if your data is held in a third parties systems?
5. How confident are you that when someone arrives on your website you know who they are?
6. What other non-marketing systems collect personally identifiable information about your customers and are you able to marry these up to data in your marketing tech stack?
7. Do you run programmatic advertising campaigns and who manages the programmatic buying desk, your employees or your agencies?
8. How integrated are your teams when they plan campaigns? For instance does your social desk talk to your search desk, and do they know what display campaigns are running in the market at any given time?
9. Does your direct marketing team have visibility of search, social and display campaigns?
10. Thinking of search, social, display and video do you know how your agency is structured and whether they have an integrated or disjointed approach to managing your campaigns?
11. Is responsibility for search, social and display split across agencies?
12. How sophisticated is your attribution modeling? Are you still relying on first last clicks and are you able attribute across multiple formats and channels? And perhaps more importantly, how quickly can you respond to the insights derived from your models?
If you can answer yes to most of these questions positively you are doing better than many of your peers.

• "Advertising plan
• Customer acquisition plan
• Email marketing plan
• A retention plan
• A social media marketing plan
• Conversion optimisation plan
• Business plan
  
  • New product development
  • Revenue sources
  • Means of cost management
• Marketing plan
  
  • Geographically based
  • Product based
  • Business unit based
  • Focused on segmentation
• Campaign plan
• Digital marketing plan / Digital transformation plan
• Multichannel marketing plan"

Which social platforms work best for B2B marketing? How is the demographic of the B2B buyer changing? How are B2B marketers using content? Find out the answers to those questions and many others.

As the chart illustrates, based on where a particular vendor is placed on the Reality Check, you'd want to further drill-down on aspects such as - 

• Is the slow pace of product development causing "technical debt" to pile up and will you be saddled with an outdated product, right out of the gate?
• Migration headaches, buggy new releases, all your customizations may not work - lots of thorny issues here. Also, vendor marketing hype gets ahead of new product capabilities
• Is the vendor pivoting and are their focus areas changing? Were they just acquired (a particularly risky time for you)? Will they be continue to support the business use cases that are important to you?
• Is there so much turbulence that should you be looking at alternatives?

A Martech Fred has the sophisticated platforms and enjoys talking about their tech stack, but struggle to fully apply that technology. They have a marketing automation platform they still use like a $49 per month batch and blast email tool. They have a powerful CMS they use to deliver a static web experience or advanced analytics technology they use to pull the same reports available from a free solution. So how do we fight Fredness?

• Writing the check is only the beginning  
• Commit to training 
• Know it won’t happen overnight 

Unfortunately for digital marketers, collateral damage often doesn’t reveal itself until it’s too late – you’ve signed on the dotted line and you have a year-plus contract to fulfil. There are three commonly over-looked, but also hard to vet, complications when you add marketing tech to your website:

• Site performance
• Product customisation
• Real-time functionality

The good news is, you can you avoid these complications while still in the buying process. Here’

1. Real-time decision making finally gets real
Many organisations looked into or acquired technology to facilitate real-time when it first emerged as a leading trend, but it is only now that many are actually practically applying it. 

2. Taking steps towards cognitive computing
The next few years will see organisations start to get to grips with what cognitive computing can offer. While there is much fascination with the potential for cognitive, there is still an element of nervousness from many organisations, especially when it comes to A.I. This is not unfounded, as A.I. has not yet reached the point where it can run without careful human monitoring. 

3. The growing need for data management and governance

4. Getting your digital estate in order
Organisations are still failing to fully understand their digital estates and the systems they already have. Many are fairly digitally mature, with estates that have grown at a rapid pace. Due to the particularly high turn-over in senior marketing roles, coupled with increasing marketing technology spend, businesses are likely to have multiple systems in place, which are not being utilised or integrated properly.

G2Cloud

Capterra

TrustRadius

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One of the simplest ways to do this is by using a martech blueprint. This technique involves creating a visual diagram that outlines current technology, systems, processes and data flows. This allows marketers to gain a single view of their technology investments to identify opportunities for consolidation, chokepoints, and even where new tech can fill a big gap as they phase out others.

Here are a few things you can do to overcome and prevent this “too much martech” scenario:

• Align technology with business priorities.
• Do an inventory check on existing technology. 
• Ensure all tools and systems connect. 
• Make a business case to rip out the tech “stuff” that is “nice to have.” 

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.