“Change” has been the theme in tech marketing for the past several years. We recently published the results of our 22nd annual tech marketing spend benchmark, IDC Tech Marketing Investment Guide for 2025 Planning: Benchmarks, Key Performance Indicators, and CMO Priorities.
The results reflect the acceleration of digital transformation over the past five years, the rapid adoption of GenAI, and marketing’s response to the permanent shift in consumer and B2B buying behavior. The trendline indicates that marketing has officially entered the next era – the AI experience era.
A Look Back at Marketing Since the Dawn of Digital
In 2007, social media was introduced to the world, forever altering how consumers obtain information and engage with brands. For the next decade and a half, marketers embarked on a digital transformation of both customer engagement and internal operations.
Digital, social and demand centers of excellence were formed. Automation platforms for both marketing and sales were adopted. Use of analytics and database marketing placed the responsibility of creating leads and driving demand, squarely in marketing’s remit.
In 2023, GenAI changed the game.. Creative capabilities were broadly placed into the hands of all marketers and citizen creators. Searching and gathering information was augmented and in some cases, replaced by GenAI applications such as ChatGPT. In the 2024 B2B Tech Buyer Behavior Study, 20% of respondents stated they are using AI Chatbots to search and for discovery of information, brands and vendors. This has lead marketing leaders to take full responsibility for the digital customer experience and the orchestration of the omnichannel experience.
The 4 Biggest Things to Happen to Marketing in the Next Decade
- Marketing’s Remit Has Expanded
Starting back in 2021, IDC Research showed that marketing’s #1 remit was driving business growth. In the 2023 Marketing Organizational Models study, at least 80% of senior marketing leaders stated they carry the responsibility of digital customer experience, employee communications, internal brand communications and marketing technology.
In 2024, IDC research found that CMOs are now assuming the role of the Chief Market Officer, expanding marketing’s role with the full accountability across the go-to-marketing engine, including sales.
As a result, the technology marketing spend benchmark found a 10.8% increase in marketing investment year-over-year. The allocation of investments have evolved, increasing the investment in marketing technology program spend by 26% and allocating 3.4% more to staffing of MarTech roles.
Digital experience roles have evolved far beyond email and phone outreach to know include managing chat and mobile/SMS engagement. Web and social media marketing staffing has grown 8% as a result of advertising staff experiencing a shift to enable more social media efforts, mobile advertising, pulling work in-house from agencies.
- The AI Disruption
56% of benchmark participants anticipate a 10% or higher ROI from GenAI in the next 12-18 months. A quarter of marketing leaders believe that GenAI represents a major opportunity and are striving to be leaders, even if it means making mistakes.
GenAI is actively being utilized across marketing. 97% of marketers are leveraging GenAI to support content marketing, including dynamic SEO optimization, creating derivatives of content, translating and localizing.
82% of marketers are supporting the evolution of web marketing, beyond digitally delivering analog content (i.e. PDFs) to incorporating more interactive and immersive content, such as personalized digital assistants, hyper-personalized web pages and personalized offers.
Marketing operations are also experiencing substantial benefits from GenAI with close to 80% of marketers focused use cases such as micro-segmentation, more real time insights and gathering voice-of-the-customer.
- ABM Gives Way to Personalization-at-Scale
While the term “Account Based Marketing” or ABM is still floating around, less marketers are focused on continuing to enable personalized marketing for a subset of the customer and prospect base.
Instead, marketers are leveraging GenAI to achieve personalization-at-scale. The benchmark study found an increase in industry and audience marketing staff positions as marketers are created horizontal teams focused on connected experiences, moving beyond marketing to one persona and instead focusing on the whole marketing journey.
A key dependency for GenAI and personalization-at-scale is the health of marketing’s data infrastructure. Marketing is only as good as the data it runs on. Recognizing how critical intelligence is to AI experience marketing, marketers rebalanced their intelligence investment across competitive, customer and market intelligence. The investment in the MarTech stack sits at 4.4% of the marketing budget, with a 22.4% surge in data and analytics spending year-over-year.
- Marketing to GenAI
There is a lot of conversation around GenAI evolving the marketing function, even changing marketing roles. Did you consider that soon you may be marketing to GenAI agents of your customers? Even having your own GenAI agent engage, rather than a marketing or sales representative? In the 2024 B2B Tech Buyer Behavior Study, 73% of B2B buyers stated they would use more AI guided selling assistants to act as an intermediary between themselves and vendors, such as doing product comparisons, responding to RFI/RFPs, answering technical questions and providing quotes and configurations.
Shoring up your data, tech stack, digital experience enablement, and LLM optimization is critical. This requires a combination of technology and UX in addition to continued investment in technology and experience platforms.
It is also essential to make sure you have the right people to deliver. Marketers must continue to up-skill and hire staff that understands how to train and prompt LLMs, design and implement omnichannel experiences.
Over the last five years, we have seen the shift in the priorities and focus of marketers through their marketing investment trends. IDC Research finds that the executive team now has a spotlight on marketing’s technology investment and the maturity of customer intelligence.
To deliver to marketing’s strategic responsibility and expectations, leaders need to maintain the investment focus on maturing the core AI experiential capabilities, essential for marketing in the experience era.
