Technology should be used to make work easier. To help marketers focus on the ultimate job of retaining and recruiting customers. But many are finding their martech stack is unwieldy and underused.

Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey shows marketers are only using 49% of their stack. In 2023, that figure stood at 33%, so it is an improvement, yes, but when half of your capability is being essentially wasted you have to consider it a major problem.

How are marketers planning to solve it? Well, according to Gartner research, 80% will buy more martech tools in the next year. The answer, it seems, is to keep throwing tech at the problem until it eventually gets better.

But this chopping and changing can lead to tech stacks that have grown out of control – even if that wasn’t the intention.

Anna Jaycocks, marketing director at loyalty brand Reward, has found throughout her carer that poorly optimised tech stacks tend be the result of one of two things: a legacy platform that a team is reluctant to change or a new leader coming into the business and wanting to introduce a tool they have used previously. Both come with their own issues.

“You could walk into a business, and they’re going, ‘We want to deal with lots of complex issues’, and you’ve been given a very basic tool because that’s what they’ve inherited,” she explains. “Or, on the flip side, it has brought in a really complicated tool and the team are trying to figure out how to use it. When, actually, something more simple could be far more effective.”

If you’re building your stack around what you’re trying to achieve, you can paint a picture to your business leaders that this technology is delivering what you need.

Barney O’Kelly, AlixPartners

But the pace of a marketer’s role and the day-to-day challenges they face mean it is often easier to just “plug in a new tool” to fill capability and skills gap and before you know it you have this “sprawling ecosystem” to wrangle rather than a “streamlined stack”, she says.

This leads to a situation where marketers are stuck with a lot of “redundant platforms” and end up only using 30-40% of what they can do, according to Keith Mitchell, founder of Chiefs Digital Media. “They’re actually paying a lot for it, too, and in my experience, by stripping out the redundant ones or leveraging the ones you’ve currently got, you can actually build a business case very easily to improve your martech stack,” he tells Marketing Week.

That point on waste resonates with Barney O’Kelly, head of solutions and product marketing at global consultancy AlixPartners, who says that a lot of marketers have been “oversold” and “over-purchased” marketing technology and are now paying the price it.

“That becomes a costly decision the business looks at and goes, ‘We’re spending a million dollars on marketing technology, we need to halve that, because I can’t see what we’re getting for that million dollars.’” he explains. “But, instead, if you’re building your stack around what you’re trying to achieve, you can paint a picture to your business leaders that this technology is delivering what you need.”

And need is very much the key point. Marketers love data. It helps makes the business case to finance and allows for greater targeting in communications. But just because you can track a number, says Victoria Lennon, a marketing consultant specialising in martech, doesn’t mean that you necessarily should.

“People think they need more data than they actually do,” she says. “Marketers need to be quite harsh and actually think about what are the metrics that matter? What are the things that tell me if things are going off the cliff or actually doing really well?”

Because while it seems like these tools are increasing your effectiveness and allowing you to present more dashboards back to the business, in reality, she says, that data “probably doesn’t even get looked at”.

A costly mistake

Martech is expensive. No-one will be handing out the Pulitzer Prize for that insight but it’s true. And that same expense is part of the reason why marketers can find themselves holding onto an element of their martech stack long after it has outlived its usefulness.

“Sunk cost fallacy is a big issue,” says O’Kelly. Not only have businesses invested a lot in the tech, they have also spent a lot of time “making it capable”.

There’s also the challenge of convincing the business the technology is going to have an impact on the bottom line. O’Kelly believes that anything “technological or digital” is still scrutinised to a greater degree than the “established tropes of marketing”, such as conference attendances and sponsorships.

I hate to see an environment where technology is being pushed without a check on where it fits into the commercial outcome or the customer journey.

Jon White

“Software as a service [SaaS] means just that: it is a recurring cost,” says O’Kelly. “It’s not a one-off cost that can be cut. If you bring something in, then, and it becomes widely adopted then you can find yourself in a difficult position where your costs start to increase quite considerably. The business notices that. And, actually, some of the SaaS vendors, frankly, have taken the piss over the years with pricing and that becomes its own problem.”

O’Kelly says there are ways to mitigate these issues to ensure the business doesn’t end up with too many costly licenses weighing down the tech stack. You want to avoid the standard “cost per license per person” and negotiate that into something more manageable.

“I’ve also historically tended to buy for extended periods of time, like three years,” says O’Kelly. “Firstly, you’ll get a discount. Secondly, you’ll get cost certainty over three years, and then you’ve probably got enough time to actually make it work.”

‘Want is different from need’: Are marketers drowning in their tech stack?

Who is running the show?

Perhaps the simple reason that many martech stacks have grown so unwieldy is that no-one is quite certain who should have full ownership over it. Does it fall under the remit of the tech department? Should it be entirely housed under marketing? It’s an expensive endeavour if it is.

Gartner research shows that marketing is only copping the bill for 50% of the enterprise martech budget as it stands – with the rest being shared by IT (34%) and a collection of other departments (16%). If those departments aren’t aligned on spend and how to make the most of the marketing tech stack then is it any wonder that wastage is happening across the board?

Lennon believes there is a problem in the way many marketing teams are structured – and that businesses are starting to recognise this.

“What’s becoming quite clear is that marketing teams have to be well structured. They have to have clear, defined processes and the right systems behind them. And that is not possible unless you’ve actually sorted out your house in a way,” she says.

What she is seeing is the growth of the “marketing operations manager” role designed solely to ensure good process and practice throughout the function – and a recognition that it cannot be down to the marketing director alone to solve these challenges.

“Having fragmented responsibility across all teams isn’t really working so there needs to be acknowledgement and investment in that,” she adds.

Experienced B2B CMO Jon White can see the logic in such a move. He explains that throughout his career, marketing technology has sat closer to the “digital environment” than it ever has to marketing. But he believes firms have got the most of the technology when it has been “plugged into” the commercial engine of the business and therefore martech meets those challenges rather than being stacked on top.

“That’s not me being precious. I hate to see an environment where technology is being pushed without a check on where it fits into the commercial outcome or the customer journey,” he explains. “Someone has to have a foot in both camps. But its centre of gravity needs to be, forget marketing, but just closer to the customer, closer to the commerciality, than too close to the technology.”

Lennon believes those marketing functions that have a central point they can rely on are better set up to get the most out of their martech stack. Particularly in growing businesses, she says, where without someone to guide the process things are prone to “fall apart” and descend into “chaos” when it comes to technology.

“Being able to create and structure a foundation that underpins your team and gives it a touch point is just so, so important,” she says. “Marketers have to advocate for that.”

‘A moveable feast’: Why are marketing teams struggling to close martech skills gaps?

What comes next

It all adds up to a simple question: how do we fix this? There’s no easy answers and for many marketers locked into expensive contracts, limited options as well. But much can be said for stepping back from all the tools and the data and the challenges and asking yourself how much of this is actually benefitting the business and the consumer at the end of the day.

“When you look at the martech stack as a whole, it should have a really clear purpose and a measurable value and a defined role within an ecosystem,” says Jaycocks. “You have to work backwards from your outcomes and think: what customer problems am I trying to face? What capability do I need? What is the skill set within my team?”

It’s a point that resonates with White who believes the martech stack has to be an extension of your commercial goals and marketing plan – and not something at the side to be ignored.

“It’s not an isolated element. It’s not a separate task or a by-product. It is integrated so you can see the linkage between the technology and the desired commercial and customer consumer outcome that you want,” says White. “So order effects: commercial, customer, technology. Don’t get those muddled up.”

As part of Marketing Week’s Unpack the Stack series we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities of martech.