Five Essential Factors To Consider Before You Allocate Marketing Spend

I'm hearing lots of news about increases in marketing spend. For instance, a few months ago Gartner predicted that CMOs will soon spend more than their counterpart CIOs, and a recent study revealed that almost half of B2B marketers will enjoy larger marketing budgets in 2013. However, there's far less chatter about where marketing execs plan to allocate their funds—and hardly any about how they'll account for results tied to all this spend. What factors are CMOs using to guide their investment decisions in this new Year of the Marketer? And how can they keep their budgets robust and growing?