Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in 2009, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council in its annual Marketing Outlook study. Despite a restrained economy, however, marketers see budgets holding up fairly well with dollars being stringently controlled and directed against growing and retaining market share.

Among the specific findings:

• Global marketers say realigning operational processes and capabilities to better support sales and drive demand generation was their top accomplishment for in 2008, followed by improving performance and accountability for their organizations.
• Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the number one force impacting budget allocations in 2009, followed by slower selling cycles and reduced consumer spending. Only 14.9 percent point to financial market disarray as a determining factor.
• Retraining and developing existing staff is the leading strategy for acquiring or sharpening expertise in digital marketing competencies, with 62.9 percent of respondents electing training over recruiting new talent (28.6 percent) or outsourcing (17.1 percent).
• When it comes to investments in marketing automation, tactical capabilities and point solutions dominate. The top two target areas of investment for 2009 are email marketing (44.9 percent) and online surveys and research (33.2 percent). Only 10.1 percent are investing in master data, 12.8 percent in marketing operational systems, and 9.3 percent in marketing resource or process management solutions.
• Grow or retain market share is the leading executive mandate for marketers, which 47.6 percent, followed by lowering costs and improving go-to-market efficiencies (43.5 percent) and improving customer insight and retention (32.5 percent).
• Only 8.2 percent respondents plan to build new linkages with line of business executives and just 7.4 percent are seeking a board member position, suggesting limited aspirations to rise within the corporate hierarchy.

Deloitte
Deloitte's Sales and Marketing Effectiveness practice combines strategic and operational capabilities to develop executable strategies that produce sustainable performance improvements across the breadth of customer-facing activities. The Sales and Marketing Effectiveness practice has successfully assisted numerous clients in improving the effectiveness of their Marketing function and providing advisory services in the areas of Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Compensation, Channel Management, Customer Experience, Strategy and Segmentation, Marketing ROI and Resource Allocation, Trade Promotion Management, Emerging Marketing Models, Spend Effectiveness and Compliance, and Customer Data Integration.

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ExactTarget
ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and one-to-one marketing solutions. The company's software as a service technology provides organizations a single platform to connect with customers via triggered and transactional email, integrated text messaging, voice messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget's technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget's software powers permission-based multi-channel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Aurora Fashions, Papa John's, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com