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Thats right, as much as 16% of the marketing budgets allocated by global B2B companies are reserved for database and direct marketing according to the CMO Council’s “Marketing Outlook 2009” report. The findings of this report was published in a story on BtoBOnline Magazine titled “CMO Council report: Many budgets up” by Kate Maddox. 

According to the story based on the report:

It found that 50% of marketers plan to cut their budgets this year while 29% plan marketing budget increases and 21% will keep their budgets flat.

This is fairly good news after heavy budget cutting over the last few months and a good sign. The other interesting find was the different programs that the marketing budget will be allocated towards which goes something like this:

• Database & Direct Marketing     16%
• Sales Collateral & Lietrature      15%
• Trade Shows & Conferences       12%
• Print Advertising                             8%
• Online Advertising                          8%
• Search Marketing                            8%
• Social Media & Viral Marketing       7%

The top spot went to database and direct mail marketing which is a clear indicator of how heavily companies rely on their databases to generate revenue. Although this year will see budgets slowly move over in areas like search marketing, online marketing and social media, currently companies are still dependent on their customer and marketing data to hit those targets. What would be interesting to learn is from the spend on database marketing how much of that budget would be allocated to:

• Acquiring new data and building the database
• Cleansing & updating existing data
• Technology to manage data and leads
• Nurturing & marketing automation
• Other

How would you allocate your budget across these 5 areas?