An increasing number of marketers are spending a larger part of their budget on MarTech than ever before, indicating a strategic prioritisation of MarTech, said Mihir Karkare, Managing Director, Mirum India, at the Pitch CMO Summit held in Mumbai this week.

During his spotlight session on the arrival of MarTech and CommerceTech, Karkare launched a report on the same and shared insights ahead of the release at the Pitch CMO Summit 2024.

“MarTech and CommerceTech have arrived. They are just unevenly distributed. We have come out with a report expanding its scope from just MarTech but also Commerce Tech. Mirum along with our parent company VML and VML Commerce, are full-service digital agencies with MarTech as well as Commerce capabilities,” he said, adding that a survey with over 250 marketing decision makers/leaders across different industries was conducted to reach a scientific process.

While launching the ‘India MarTech and CommerceTech report 2024’ powered by Mirum and VML, media partner e4m, and WebEngage, the retention partner, Karkare said, the survey was conducted along with market leaders from across industries like healthcare, BFSI, Consumer Durables, Ecommerce, EdTech, Food and Beverage, Retail and Automobile.

“The first insight of the report is that in the MarTech landscape, more respondents are spending a much larger part of their budget on MarTech than ever before, indicating a strategic prioritization of MarTech. Above 65% of the respondents were spending over 16% of their marketing budget on MarTech. It was 18% respondents in 2023. It is phenomenal growth,” he said.

As per the report, over 50% of marketers said that their marketing strategy was driven by an equal mix of technology and creativity. But this number was 70% last year, said Karkare.

However, technology as the answer to driving marketing strategy has shifted from 10 to 26% this year, he added.

Sharing another finding from the report, Karkare said that number of executives were not on the same page when it came to marketing technology. “While 72% CEOs and CMOs prefer a MarTech tool that is a part of an integrated stack, the percentage of CDOs or CTOs is 53%. The difference of opinion likely contributes to one of the key challenges in selecting MarTech tools identified in the report – complexity of choosing the right MarTech tools.”

As per the report, Creativity and Data & Analytics rank the highest as the most important skills in MarTech teams, followed by brand strategy, social media search engine optimization and management, and content creation.

Talking about the Commerce Tech landscape, Karkare said 95% of respondents (market leaders) view CommerceTech as a strategic growth driver for their organisations.

“From a good-to-have capability to an indispensable growth engine, digital commerce is now a strategic growth driver for most organisations,” said Karkare.

In the survey, it was also found that given the lower barriers to activating branded profiles and larger reach, 60% of companies under 500 employees strongly favour social commerce.

Talking about the trend of GenAI, he said that the use of this tool was to improve content marketing efficiency.

“But the use-cases are not very popular, thanks to conversational prompt-based content generation tools that gained fame overnight. For over 35% respondents, improving content marketing efficiency is the most sought-after reason for adopting GenAI tools,” he said while launching the report.