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Forty-two percent of respondents to CIO’s recent State of the CIO survey say that their marketing department currently has budget specifically earmarked for investments in technology products and services — almost all of them within the next three years. If that figure sounds high to you, it shouldn’t. As David Ginsburg, vice president of marketing at Cavirin, said when asked about that figure, “What is strange is that only 42 percent have explicitly budgeted for tech.  What about the other 58 percent?”

Hopefully IT departments have gone beyond the point where they think of marketing as mere fluff. But they may not be fully up to speed on marketing’s needs — the technology sector that’s become known as martech. We spoke to a broad range of marketing pros to find out just where all that marketing tech spend is going.  

Marketing automation

Fundamentally, marketers are looking for what any employee wants out of at-work tech: tools to make their jobs faster and easier. Ginsburg calls tools like these “force multipliers”: they make it possible for one person to do work that would’ve taken a whole team in an earlier age. Think of them as the sort of robotic exoskeleton marketers strap on to go boost brand awareness and, ultimately, company revenues. 

Of course, force multiplication doesn’t just make the work life of individual employees easier. These tools increasingly automate many marketing processes and make it possible to do more with less — or, as Greg Fitzgerald, CMO of JASKbluntly puts it, “the key is to automate as much as possible so that a person does not have to be hired.” Carolyn Crandall, CMO at Attivo Networks, explains what tasks are being fobbed off onto the machines: “Marketers need tools that automate operations, simplify admin tasks, track analytics, conduct account-based marketing, and ultimately, boost sales.”