Engineering marketers can learn a lot from each other by comparing how they are allocating their budgets. Every year we run a survey that asks them about their budget plans, and every year the data that comes out is awesomely helpful to all marketers.
How about adding your knowledge to help us all be better marketers? Just complete this 5 minute survey.
Here’s a sneak peek of the 2017 results from the early survey respondents. They tell us that 33% of engineering marketers will have bigger budgets in 2017 than in 2016.
You may be asking yourself, is this a new trend? Who are these marketers who have been getting more budget? And how much more did they get?
Are bigger budgets a new trend for engineering marketers?
In a word, no, this is not a new trend. For the past 3 years, more marketers have reported having bigger budgets than those who have reported that their budgets shrank.
Last year, 38% of marketers said that they were going to get bigger budgets. In 2015, the share of marketers getting bigger budgets was only 21%, but that was still more than the 18% of marketers who said that their budgets would be shrinking in 2015.
To put this in perspective, every year that this survey has run, the share of marketers with increasing budgets was larger than the share with smaller budgets.
Who are these marketers that get bigger budgets?
Not surprisingly, marketers with large budgets, those over $1M, tend to have not as much movement in their budgets when expressed as a percentage. Most of those marketers reported that their budgets in 2017 would be “about the same” as their budgets in 2016.
That makes sense from an arithmetic perspective. Adding $50,000 to a $1M budget results in a budget that is “about the same”, whereas adding $50,000 to a $40,000 budget results in popping champagne corks.
But the growth calculation is not all about starting from a small budget. While there aren’t yet any marketers with budgets over $1M who reported getting huge budget increases, even some of those with budgets ranging up to $1M reported big increases. And by big increases, some of them reported getting budgets that were more than 20% bigger than in 2016.
Erik Hoogerhuis, VP Sales & Marketing at software application monitoring vendor Cetrus, was one marketer who reported having a budget that was more than 20% bigger this year. He said, “I’ve been “marketing” primarily by working with resellers and attending conferences. Looking forward to 2017, we’ll need to look for other lead sources. Given that our software services a narrow niche, our biggest budget line item will be for email campaigns to promote our free trial.”
Why are budgets growing?
Why have engineering marketers seen more budget growth than shrinkage over the past few years? The most logical answer is that these marketers have been able to prove to their executives that investing more in marketing will result in a positive return in the form of more sales.
Further evidence comes in the form of a related survey question – Do you believe that marketing is becoming more important to your company relative to sales. 65% of survey respondents said, “Yes”.
There are a lot more nuances to uncover about engineering budgets, including:
- What types of campaigns are proving most effective?
- How much budget is going to search marketing compared to last year?
- How are the top performing marketers allocating their budgets differently
We’ll analyze all of these questions and more once the survey closes.
Please complete the survey to help make us all smarter
The data for this sneak peek comes from 57 marketers who have completed the survey so far. If you haven’t yet added your insights, please do so here. And please share this with your engineeirng marketing colleagues – we can all get better at marketing by sharing this information.
Best,
John
