Industry surveyGartner, 2025

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

Channel mix & planning

Reader Note:: Both axes are relative ranks across the 19 channels the survey covers, with no units. Search advertising and digital display sit high on both axes rather than below the line.
Evidence:: Expert judgment
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).

Good for

Hearing how someone who knows the field reads it, and deciding what to check yourself.

Not for

Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
The source never says how this number was measured.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

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%

Change in marketing budget allocation by resource, 2018 to 2025
Resource	Change 2018 to 2025 (percentage points)
Paid media	7.4
Labor	-2.6
Agencies	-2.3
Martech	-6.8

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).

Go deeper on this topic

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

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%

Open full graph

39%

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

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%

Open full graph

9.6%

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

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

Good for

Not for

Related cards

Go deeper on this topic