IDC’s CMO Tech Marketing Barometer ( March 2008 ) reported lead generation to be a top priority for technology marketers. The study was comprised of 41 tech companies who cumulatively said their budgets would increase 4% this year, which was down from 6.1% last year over 2006.
With shrinking budgets and lead generation being the top priority at technology firms, it makes you wonder what the budget stats would have been if each of these 41 tech companies confirmed they were leveraging a systematic demand generation solution.
The study also indicated that 57.0% of tech marketers plan to increase their marketing budgets this year, compared with 75.0% of marketers that increased their marketing budgets last year. 15% of tech marketers will decrease their marketing budgets, and 28.0% will keep them flat.
Lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers this year (ranked 4.3 in importance on a scale of 0-5), followed by brand awareness (4.0), online and interactive marketing (4.0), alignment with sales (3.9), marketing performance measurement (3.9), customer knowledge (3.6) and channel/partner marketing (3.4).
Hmmmm.....
