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Maximize ROI With Martech (Marketing Technology)
Build trust and safeguard your budget with a fully utilized martech stack
Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey reveals that martech utilization has plummeted to 33%, creating risk and drawing CMOs into a choice of how to respond. CMOs must balance their pursuit of AI in marketing with maximizing returns on their existing martech implementation.
Download our eBook, “4 Actions to Improve Martech ROI,” and discover martech best practices on how to:
Get the most value from martech tools
Improve the IT-marketing partnership
Set a firm foundation for AI innovation
See Gartner research in action at our conferences and events.
Maximize the impact and efficiency of marketing technology
An effective tech stack is crucial for CMOs to capitalize on martech’s impact. Focus on these key areas to unlock your martech capabilities.
Martech Strategy
Martech Vendor Selection
Martech Use Cases
Tailor your martech strategy to support your business objectives
The marketing technology stack is in a quiet crisis right now. Digital marketing leaders report that just 33% of their martech stack is being used. What’s more, only 11% of leaders report a significant increase in their use of marketing technology over the past year.
Despite these sagging adoption numbers, many CMOs are investing in new marketing channels and feeling the allure of emerging technologies such as generative AI (GenAI). CMOs currently oversee an average of nine channels — and counting. Twenty percent of organizations say they have already adopted new channels and emerging technologies, while the rest plan to do so in the near future.
Martech leaders must embrace the potential of these innovations while using their existing resources to the fullest. Under short-term pressure from executives to optimize costs, marketing leaders should focus on quick wins and easily achievable use cases based on the current tech stack. Subsequently, as a long-term goal, look to transform the marketing function through GenAI and other emerging technologies.
When developing a martech strategy, ask questions such as:
What should the organization’s multiyear martech roadmap look like, and how can the marketing team and its IT partners help achieve it?
Which parts of the current martech stack are redundant or unprofitable, and how can the organization identify and remove them?
How will new additions to the marketing technology stack support customer journey orchestration?
Where are the opportunities for cross-team consolidation and integration of marketing technologies?
Conduct regular martech audits to optimize your technology ecosystem
Martech audits are essential to improve marketing outcomes and optimize costs. According to the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, 76% of marketing technology leaders audit their stacks at least twice a year. This regular cadence helps uncover underused capabilities and aligns investments with business priorities.
Why martech audits matter: Despite martech accounting for nearly 24% of total marketing spend, its dispersion across the organization can make management challenging. Audits help marketers extract more value from existing tech investments and establish a foundation for stack optimization.
Steps for conducting a martech audit:
Document vendors and products. Create a comprehensive list of martech vendors and their products currently in use.
Engage stakeholders. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to validate and expand your list.
Map organizational impact. Identify teams dependent on each tool and document the specific capabilities they rely on.
Assess costs and utilization. Compare costs to utilization data to identify tools with low adoption or redundant capabilities.
Analyze utilization gaps. Evaluate how effectively each tool meets its intended objectives.
Visualize your ecosystem. Map your martech ecosystem and utilization levels.
Iterate and refine. Schedule regular audits to measure progress and refine your martech ecosystem.
Strategic use of audits: By aligning audit findings with broader goals, organizations can use audits as a critical input to ongoing martech strategy planning. Audits inform the present state and guide recurring prioritization and roadmap planning cycles, steering organizations toward a more optimized and strategic future.
Think beyond conventional RFPs and accelerate your martech vendor selection
With significant martech investments and heightened expectations, leaders must ensure that their selection of martech solution vendors will make an impact.
Traditionally, martech leaders have relied on RFPs to identify vendors that may help fulfill a desired outcome. But in light of emerging consumer and martech trends, traditional RFPs, which can take four to six months to complete, can no longer keep up. The average martech roadmap extends more than 15 months into the future, resulting in RFP responses that reflect a prior state of the martech stack.
To select the best martech platforms to meet your organization’s needs, audit your internal marketing technology ecosystems to identify where your organization excels in its use of tools, any overlap in use cases, and areas of opportunity where utilization is low. For each marketing technology, consider these three primary groups:
Audiences. These are the recipients of your marketing campaigns and communications generated by the marketing technology.
Daily users. These are employees, contractors and agency partners who use the martech tool every day to do their jobs, as well as occasional users such as managers or analysts who may access the system on an as-needed basis to pull reports or data for performance insights.
Power users. These individuals are ultimately responsible for successfully integrating and deploying the martech solution. They are the go-to people between your organization and the technology provider.
For daily and power users, assign clear roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for successful martech implementation.
Build a martech story that outlines your organization’s current and desired capabilities alongside your measured marketing outcomes. Highlight:
Your martech ecosystem as it exists today
Your martech roadmap
Your user groups
Your desired outcomes
Direct prospective vendors to show — not tell — the value of their solution. Typical RFPs prioritize tactical features and functions over outcomes and performance. This creates a disconnect between marketing leaders and vendors during and after the process, increasing the likelihood of failure. Require vendors to demonstrate how the solution’s martech capabilities — such as marketing automation, marketing analytics and personalization technologies — meet your specific needs and how the solution will integrate with sales CRM and other relevant applications across the business. Also require the vendor to provide user references.
Seek a competitive proof of concept (POC) where two or more vendors simultaneously test their martech platforms against the same scenario. This allows you to perform a comparative analysis to gain an accurate measure of the vendors’ performance and impact.
Choose the most effective use cases for your martech roadmap
Martech budgets have come under heightened scrutiny. Eighty-five percent of marketing leaders say they face increased pressure to speed up the delivery of martech-enabled capabilities to their teams. Unless they pick up the pace, these leaders could see their martech budgets reduced or redirected before they can see results.
The obvious solution is to make better, smarter use of the existing technology stack — but many businesses are strangled by the complexity of their own martech ecosystem. Marketing leaders say this complexity is the top barrier to greater martech adoption in their organization.
To avoid getting sidetracked on your martech roadmaps, identify and define the most effective martech use cases. When weighing the options, consider the “four S’s”:
Supportive. Martech use cases must deliver measurable business results and align with broader business outcomes. Each should have a quantifiable metric to assess progress, financially or otherwise.
Selective. Focus martech use cases on specific tasks for marketing team members with no more than two dependencies. Break down or defer use cases with more dependencies until resolved.
Simple. Ensure martech use cases are straightforward and achievable within one to three months.
Specific. Clearly define the user story, data and technology needed for each martech use case to help technical teams estimate effort and timelines effectively.
Once these use cases are defined, it can be tempting to sort them by value and feasibility, focusing on the high-value and high-feasibility ones first to deliver quick wins. However, once these quick wins pass, the roadmap will decelerate significantly as teams shift focus to less feasible use cases with the same or lower value. Marketing leaders need to think long-term to avoid stalling out on their martech roadmap.
Collaborate with technical teams to sort use cases into groups or clusters. Each cluster should be dependent on the same underlying systems — for example, the multichannel marketing hub (MMH), point of sale (POS) or store inventory management system (SIM). Leaders can then focus on quick wins within each cluster and reprioritize at regular intervals, leading to a roadmap that speeds up rather than slows down over time.
Attend a Conference
Join Gartner experts and your peers to accelerate growth
Join CMOs and marketing executives to learn how to navigate emerging trends and challenges. From peer-led sessions to analyst one-on-ones, you'll leave ready to tackle your mission-critical priorities.
8 – 10 Jun 2026
Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™
Denver, CO
Martech FAQs
What is martech, and why is it important for businesses?
Martech, short for marketing technology, refers to the tools and software used by marketers to plan, execute and measure marketing campaigns. It is crucial for CMOs and marketing leaders because it helps optimize marketing efforts, improve customer engagement and maximize ROI by leveraging data and technology..
How can businesses maximize ROI with their martech investments?
Marketing organizations can maximize ROI with regular martech audits, optimizing their tech stack, improving IT-marketing partnerships and focusing on quick wins and achievable use cases. Additionally, integrating technologies like AI can further enhance marketing outcomes.
What are the common challenges faced in martech utilization?
Common challenges include low utilization rates, complexity of the tech stack and difficulty in proving ROI. Additionally, aligning martech investments with business objectives and managing emerging technologies like AI can be challenging.
How should CMOs approach martech vendor selection?
CMOs should focus on developing clear martech user stories, assess integration capabilities with existing and emerging technologies and conduct competitive proofs of concept. This ensures that the selected vendors align with business goals and deliver measurable impact.
What role does AI play in modern marketing technology?
AI plays a significant role in enhancing marketing automation, personalization and analytics. It helps businesses improve efficiency, target audiences more effectively and innovate with new engagement models.
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