Martech spending continues strong despite rocky economy

Some 60% of businesses are increasing their spending on martech this year, according to a study by Clevertouch Marketing and the University of Southampton. However, more B2B businesses are reporting trouble in the stacks. 

This year 23% of B2B firms said their stack was several, unconnected disparate platforms. That’s a huge increase from 2022 when only 10% of companies said this. No surprise then that only 27.4% of these businesses say their martech stack is fully integrated and can pass data seamlessly between solutions. That’s a 12 percentage point drop from last year. Despite this, 31.7% say their customer experience is seamless. 

Dig deeper: B2B martech spending growth slows, may hit $8.5 billion by 2024

On the B2C side, 40.6% say their stack is fully integrated, which is essentially flat from last year’s 39.7%. Also, 7.7% have unconnected platforms that are not connected, down from 9.9% last year. 

Overall, marketers are happy with how their platforms are performing, with 84% saying they are satisfied with them, up 4 percentage points from last year.

The survey of 659 senior marketers across the U.S., U.K. and E.U., also showed the biggest marketing investments this year are:

1. Campaigns: 19.7%
2. Services: 19.3% 
3. Integration: 15.9% 
4. People: 9.6%

Why we care. While the B2B numbers are perplexing, it’s good to see that investments in martech remain strong amid the choppy economic waters. Also, those satisfaction numbers are strong and getting stronger. All this suggests that there are solutions even for companies having stack problems.