VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 29, 2020 —Allocadia, the leader in Marketing Performance Management (MPM), today released its inaugural State of Spend benchmark report, highlighting exactly how marketers pivoted their marketing budgets and strategies in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aggregate data from Allocadia’s global customer base — which manages more than $25 billion in budgets using it’s platform — sheds light on current trends and provides a roadmap for marketers to invest dollars wisely in 2021.
New insights for the post-COVID future
In this unpredictable time, companies are scrambling like never before to learn what their competitors are doing — and to keep up with or stay ahead of them. “Marketing budgets are the ultimate expression of strategy, so this isn’t just shifting spend. These are real-time adjustments marketing organizations made to their budgets and plans as the world changed around them,” said Julia Stead, CMO of Allocadia. “Knowing the market and the patterns that are emerging during the COVID pandemic is invaluable as companies develop a tentative future based on limited data points; every data point matters.”
The inaugural State of Spend is a manifestation of Allocadia’s extensive knowledge of the marketing investment and performance space. The report, including trends uncovered in the wake of the first economic quarter impacted by the pandemic, can be viewed in its entirety here.
Demand wins this round
A key finding from Allocadia’s report was the discrepancy in how companies actually budgeted in Q2 compared to common sentiments from industry pundits and analysts, who hypothesized that Q2 was the time to focus on brand awareness and perception at the expense of demand programs. Instead, many companies did the opposite, as funding for demand programs increased by 50% —at the expense of 20% cuts in PR budgets and a 16% decrease in brand identity spending.
Decimation of in-person programs
Similarly striking were the COVID implications impacting in-person event budgets in Q2. It was no surprise to anyone that event spending was cut in half, but what was unexpected was that the money was not re-allocated and instead disappeared. This is especially noteworthy considering the increase in demand programs. Over half of all companies lost more than 10% of their program spend in the first half of the year — and those were the lucky ones. An unlucky 15% of companies reported more than a third of their total program spend was cut.
The good news is the data showed an increase in event budget forecast from Q2 to Q3. “As we budget and prepare for 2021, marketers may be able to stretch their dollars farther by experimenting with hybrid events — largely virtual programs with a small amount of people joining in person,” explained Stead.
Methodology
This marketing spend benchmarking report was based on the actual data of how Allocadia’s B2B customer base is investing their budgets. The budgets of more than 50 marketing organizations at enterprise companies, representing billions of dollars in marketing investments around the world, were analyzed and aggregated to show overarching trends in marketing spend. The companies’ overall revenue data was pulled from DataFox or Yahoo! Finance, depending on whether or not the company is publicly traded.
About Allocadia
Say good-bye to multiple spreadsheets, disparate data sets and misaligned marketing plans. The recognized leader in Marketing Performance Management (MPM), Allocadia’s budget management and strategic planning platform is the foundation for operational excellence for marketing leaders and their teams. Powered with data-driven insights, marketing leaders can visualize what’s working to enable greater planning agility. Companies like GE Healthcare, Unilever, Informatica and Charles Schwab manage more than $25 billion marketing dollars within Allocadia, which enables them to save up to 40% of the time they spend on budgeting and planning as well as double their pipeline-to-spend ratio and ROI. Learn how to run marketing like a business at Allocadia.com.
