Industry surveyGartner, 2025

Paid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%

Channel mix & planning

Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025

Reader Note:: Mean share of the marketing budget across the four major resource areas. In 2018 the order was martech 29.2%, labor 24.5%, paid media 23.2%, agencies 23.0%. In 2025 it is paid media 30.6%, martech 22.4%, labor 21.9%, agencies 20.7%. The 2025 shares add up to 95.6% rather than 100%, so the four do not account for the whole budget.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: Low
Sample:: Gartner CMO Spend Survey respondents across 11 countries and 10 major industries; mix of 42% B2B, 23% B2C, and 35% even mix B2B/B2C; mean annual revenue $5.7B. Some breakout charts show industry sample sizes such as consumer products (n=43), manufacturing (n=52), pharma (n=32), financial services (n=50), retail (n=36), insurance (n=43), media (n=31), healthcare (n=42), travel and hospitality (n=37), and IT/business services (n=36).

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33.8%

of US Fashion site visits now come from paid channels (Search + Social + Display), overtaking Direct traffic's 27.8% share for the first time in three years (Jul 2023–Jul 2026).

Marketing budgets ranged from 5.8% to 9.7% of company revenue across industries in 2025, with consumer products highest and IT and business services lowest

Marketing budget as a percent of total revenue by industry, 2025
Industry	2025 (%)
Consumer products	9.7%
Manufacturing	9.5%
Pharma	9%
Media	8%
Insurance	7.5%
Financial services	7.2%
Retail	7.1%
Tech services and products companies with over $250M revenue	7.1%
Travel and hospitality	6.7%
Healthcare	5.9%
IT and business services	5.8%

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Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

53.9% of US marketing leaders say marketing keeps influencing a customer for a year or longer, though the most common single answer is several months at 24.4% and the report's median is six months

Marketing Performance: Perceived marketing influence duration on customers, as reported by US CMOs in 2026
Duration	Percent (%)
An hour	0.6%
12 hours	0.6%
A day	1.3%
A week	2.6%
A month	6.4%
Several months	24.4%
6 months	10.3%
1 year	21.8%
2 years	18.6%
5 years	9%
7 years	0%
10 years or more	4.5%

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39%

of CMOs plan to reduce their agency budget in 2025, and the same share plan to reduce labour

SEO, social, email, retail media and influencer all rank higher on impact than on the budget they receive

9.6%

of overall budget and company revenues go to marketing on average (2026 survey of US companies)

Paid media overtook martech as the largest slice of the marketing budget between 2018 and 2025, rising from 23.2% to 30.6% while martech fell from 29.2% to 22.4%

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