How badly have marketers been hit by the pandemic? More than half – 55% — reported a budget cut, according to this Chief Marketer study. The marketing mix is also changing, with growth in social media, content marketing, influencer marketing, and email. Losers include search marketing, referrals, and, of course, live events.
I guess there’s some irony in talking about location tracking at a time when much of the country is rarely leaving home. But the pandemic shall pass and when it does, marketers will be eager to connect the dots between advertising and in-store customer behaviors. Which brings us to this announcement that location-based ad and attribution vendor Reveal Mobile is partnering with Tapad, which will help them to measure retail foot traffic and target store visitors (and their households) across devices.
In more quotidian news, Mailchimp has purchased AI platform Inspector 6, which analyzes marketing content, looks at its performance, and suggests improvements. The target is small businesses that lack human staff to do such things. But if you human marketers aren’t looking over your shoulder, you should start.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.