The 2020 State of Marketing

Marketing trends and actionable insights on what works today

Building a marketing plan should be the first focus of every organization. To help marketers with this not so easy task, the Growth Marketing Stage team has released a 2020 Marketing Benchmark Report.

What’s in it for you - a collection of 90 dashboards with a clear guidance on the tough decisions marketers constantly face: budgets, strategies, tactics, channels, and more… 

To build this report, we interviewed hundreds of respondents from a mix of industries, company sizes, and levels of seniority.

KEY INSIGHTS:

Marketing challenges becoming more relevant to organizations

Which of the following marketing challenges are currently most relevant to your organization? (check all that apply).

This chart represents the growing marketing challenges marketers have faced from 2019 to 2020. Year after year, the greatest marketing challenges are generating traffic and leads, providing ROI to marketing activities, and generating PR “buzz”.

Marketers increasing investment into content and growth marketing

Please select the statement that best describes how you expect your organization's budget will change for the following categories in 2020.

The majority of marketers are increasing their marketing budgets for content marketing, SEO, growth marketing, website design, social media, PPC and PR. When considering outbound efforts, TV, and print ads, there are no huge plans on investment. The growing potential of utilizing inbound tactics and growth marketing is most likely a result of cost effectiveness of these channels.

The effectiveness of marketing tactics

Please indicate the effectiveness of the following marketing tactics for your organization.

A huge preference of utilizing inbound marketing tactics can be seen in the above chart. The least effective tactics are outbound.

The implementation of growth marketing

Did you try to implement growth marketing in your organization?

The adoption of growth marketing is becoming a popular approach. 39% of respondents said that they tried implementing growth marketing. Another 38% of respondents indicated that they had plans to implement growth marketing in their organization.

In this report we’ve analyzed each of the marketing tactics separately to better understand the execution and effectiveness of each of them for different organization sizes and industry sectors.

The data is available in the full version of the report.

Marketing Budgets:

Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue by organization size

Please enter your organization's marketing budget as a percentage of revenue.

The smaller the company is, the larger the percentage of revenue dedicated to the marketing budgets is.

The allocation of marketing budgets

Approximately what percentage of your marketing budget is allocated to each of the following tactics.

A lot of significant expenses are required when participating in trade shows: travel, booth rental, etc., making this tactic to get a significant portion of marketing budgets of the respondents.

Growth Marketing and PPC top the list after Events.

The allocation of marketing budgets by industry sector

Want to get all the insights? Download the full version of 2020 Marketing Benchmark Report here.