Survey: Marketing Budgets on the Rise as Demand Gen Becomes a Top Priority

As marketers’ budgets fluctuate with changing demands, new research suggests that they are focused more on lead generation, as well as sales and marketing alignment to achieve their primary goals.

DemandGen, Content4Demand, DemandBase and Salesforce Pardot recently came together to conduct the “2019 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey” to see how marketers’ budgets are lining up with their top objectives. The majority of respondents (30 percent) said that their demand generation budgets are set to increase by more than 20 percent in the coming months. At least 16 percent claimed that it will rise by more than 30 percent.

As marketers look to increase their spend on demand generation, 59 percent of respondents said that one of their top goals in 2019 is to improve sales and marketing alignment. About 58 percent could like to begin focusing on lead quality over quantity, and 49 percent would like to improve the depth and accuracy of their databases.

Sales and Marketing Continue to Close the Gap

Previous research has indicated that marketers and sales teams are coming closer together to achieve similar goals, such as demand generation.

LinkedIn published its “State of Sales” ebook, which found that the number of salespeople who work “very closely” or “closely” with marketing has grown 35 percent since 2016.

Additionally, top sales performers have a stronger relationship with their marketing team members. These individuals are 13 percent more likely to say they work “very closely” or “closely” with marketers in prospecting efforts than their counterparts.