Optimize your martech investments to drive growth, innovation and measurable business outcomes with key lessons from teams that deliver business value from technology.
The 2025 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey reveals that martech utilization has dropped to 49%, exposing organizations to risk and forcing CMOs to make strategic decisions. CMOs must balance the promise of AI in marketing with the imperative to maximize ROI from existing martech investments.
An effective tech stack is crucial for CMOs to deliver on marketing’s strategic mandate. Focus on these key areas to unlock martech’s full potential.
The marketing technology stack is in a quiet crisis. Only 49% of tools are actively used, and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers — those that meet strategic goals and demonstrate positive ROI.
Despite low adoption, CMOs continue to invest in new channels and emerging technologies like generative AI (GenAI). On average, CMOs currently oversee nine marketing channels, with 20% already adopting new ones. Yet they’re also under pressure to reduce martech spend while delivering growth.
High performers prioritize composable stacks and capability-driven measurement to justify investments and scale innovation.
To succeed, CMOs must:
Adopt a composable strategy to prepare for the future of martech by emphasizing a customizable, modular and scalable architecture to increase agility and interoperability
Prioritize measurement of activated capabilities — not just a single vendor or platform
Templatize operations — creating consistent, replicable processes that AI agents can operate within
Key martech strategy questions to ask:
What should our multiyear martech roadmap look like, and how can marketing and IT collaborate to achieve it?
Which tools are redundant or underperforming, and how can we streamline the stack?
How will new technologies support customer journey orchestration?
Where can we consolidate and integrate across teams for greater efficiency?
Martech audits are essential to improve outcomes and optimize costs. With martech accounting for nearly 22% of total marketing spend, its dispersion across teams can make management challenging. Audits help CMOs identify underused tools, align investments with business capabilities and guide roadmap planning/prioritization.
Follow these 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 value: Audits should feed directly into ongoing martech strategy planning — informing the current state, guiding prioritization and enabling a more agile, outcome-driven future.
Traditional RFPs are too slow and outdated for today’s martech pace. With roadmaps extending 15+ months, RFP responses often reflect a prior state.
Instead, audit your internal ecosystem first to identify strengths, overlaps and low-utilization areas. Then evaluate vendors based on:
Audiences (campaign recipients)
Daily users (marketers, analysts, agencies)
Power users (integration and deployment leads)
Assign clear roles and responsibilities. Build a martech story that outlines:
Your current martech ecosystem
Your martech roadmap and desired capabilities
Your user groups and outcomes
Require vendors to demonstrate — not just describe — their value.
Focus on outcomes, not features.
Request user references and integration capabilities.
Conduct competitive proofs of concept (POCs).
Prioritize composability — modular, API-friendly tools that reduce lock-in.
CMOs face dual pressures: Deliver faster martech capabilities and reduce spend. Without clear use cases, budgets risk being cut before results are realized.
Complexity is the top barrier to adoption. High performers overcome this by templatizing operations for easier deployment and governance.
Use the “four S’s” to evaluate use cases:
Supportive. Aligns with business outcomes and measurable results.
Selective. Limits dependencies to improve speed and clarity.
Simple. Achievable within one to three months.
Specific. User story, data and tech requirements are clearly defined.
Avoid sorting use cases only by feasibility and value.
Instead, group them by shared systems (e.g., customer data platform [CDP], multichannel marketing hub [MMH], analytics) to unlock scalable wins and avoid bottlenecks. Collaborate with technical teams to cluster use cases and reprioritize regularly — enabling a roadmap that accelerates over time.
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Martech — short for marketing technology — includes the platforms and tools marketers use to plan, execute and measure campaigns. For CMOs, martech is essential to drive customer engagement, improve marketing efficiency and deliver measurable ROI.
To boost martech ROI, CMOs should conduct regular audits, optimize underused tools and align the stack with business capabilities. High-performing organizations use capability-driven measurement and build composable martech stacks that support AI integration and long-term flexibility.
Common barriers include low utilization, stack complexity and difficulty proving ROI. Many organizations also struggle with fragmented processes and siloed data. CMOs can overcome these by standardizing operations and collaborating with analytics teams to measure impact at the capability level.
CMOs should prioritize vendors that offer modular, API-friendly solutions and demonstrate clear business impact. Skip traditional RFPs in favor of competitive proofs of concept (POCs) and real-world use-case testing. Ensure vendors can integrate with existing systems like CRM and analytics platforms.
AI enhances marketing automation, personalization and analytics. To fully leverage AI, CMOs must evolve their martech stack to be composable, enabling AI agents to access, analyze and activate insights across platforms — driving smarter decisions and scalable innovation.
Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.
