Benchmark Analysis: Marketing Pulse Survey

August 8, 2023

As many organizations finalize their upcoming fiscal year budgets, we wanted to learn about how organizations are planning their marketing budgets - looking across overall budgetary spends, and specific areas of investment such as digital marketing efforts. Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark asked arts leaders about marketing budgets and changes due to the increased importance of digital.

Highlights from the survey include:

• Digital marketing costs and personnel expenses represent the biggest impacting factors of organizations’ marketing budget changes since last year.

• A majority of organizations allocate 10-30% of marketing budget to digital.

• Increasing ticket sales — particularly among single ticket buyers — is the top objective for digital marketing.

• The top three areas of digital marketing investment this year have been search ads, influencer marketing, and SEO.