ANZ marketing leaders are increasingly taking control of technology spending, Telsyte’s Australian and New Zealand Digital Marketer Study 2015 has found, with 91 per cent making purchasing decisions on technology products and services.
More than half the organisations surveyed also indicated the marketing department has a dedicated IT budget, a change that is reflective of a shift in the role of the Chief Marketing Officer. According to Telsyte, this has occurred as digital transformation becomes a key priority, cloud software has become ubiquitous, and the CMO is increasingly seen as custodian of big data and insight functions.
“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 Steven Noble, senior analyst, Telsyte.
Marketers are most commonly purchasing web analytics or split testing software (39 per cent), with CRM purchases also very common at 38 per cent. A further 36 per cent are using big data analytics for customer transaction analysis.
The survey also showed that marketing and IT leaders have conflicting perspectives on marketing technology.
Fifty-seven per cent of markets said they were investing in IT because they need flexibility, while 45 per cent said it was because they knew more than IT about their own needs. And marketers buying their own IT claim they are more likely to have the technology products they need – with 84 per cent of those using marketing own’s budget agreeing or strongly agreeing that “our marketing function has the technology it needs to be effective”, compared with 71 per cent of those who mostly use IT’s budget.
The trend for spending to move outside of IT is not surprisingly of concern to IT leaders. A separate Telsyte survey of CIO and ICT leaders of organisations which have lines of business purchase their own technology found that 36 per cent had experienced problems. Of these, 36 per cent cited issues with integration requirements, 33 per cent with inconsistent technology selection, and 32 per cent with security.
