Editorial
The Gist
-
Tool overload drains value. Most organizations use far more tools than they need, which leads to duplication, poor integration and underused capabilities.
-
Governance matters. Successful teams establish clear governance and assign ownership and accountability to maximize martech stack performance.
-
Simplify to scale. Simplification creates efficiency, speed and budget savings by reducing tool sprawl and overlap.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on marketing technology complexity and why so many stacks fall short. This article looks at the key challenges, including poor planning, low utilization and lack of governance. In the next piece, we will explore how teams are solving these problems through simplification, AI integration and a more flexible approach to architecture.
The marketing technology ecosystem has grown into a vast and fragmented marketplace. As of 2024, there are 14,106 unique martech solutions available, a 27.8% increase over the previous year alone. This expansion reflects how essential digital infrastructure has become to modern marketing. Yet behind the explosive growth lies a less publicized reality. Most organizations are struggling to translate martech investments into real business value.
By 2025, martech’s share of the marketing budget declined to 22%, down from 30% in 2023, according to Gartner’s longitudinal analysis. This contraction did not reflect reduced strategic relevance, but rather growing skepticism about return on investment, persistent integration challenges, and budgetary realignment toward generative AI and short-term performance channels. Despite continued platform innovation, underutilization rates, limited interoperability, and pressure to prioritize paid media collectively eroded confidence in martech’s near-term value. A primary reason for this skepticism was utilization. According to Gartner, marketers are using just 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities, down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020. A report from Deloitte further reveals that 44% of marketing stacks go completely underutilized.
Table of Contents
- Solving Martech Complexity Starts With Strategy, Not Tools
- Understanding Martech Complexity
- A Final Note on Organizational Readiness
Solving Martech Complexity Starts With Strategy, Not Tools
The prevailing belief that newer, smarter tools will lead to better outcomes has not held up under operational strain. While platforms may advertise “no-code” ease or “plug-and-play” functionality, real-world implementation often reveals mismatched integrations, siloed data and overwhelmed teams. What began as a pursuit of automation has become a cycle of acquisition and abandonment.
Martech complexity is not a technology problem; it’s a planning problem. To solve it, marketing leaders must replace tool-first thinking with a data-driven approach to strategy, governance and consolidation. Here is a new blueprint, one rooted in simplification rather than expansion.
To meaningfully address martech complexity, we must first strip away the vague terminology that often clouds conversations in this space. Words like “integration,” “automation” or even “stack” are thrown around so often that their operational implications are rarely questioned. Clarifying these terms is essential to identify what is failing and why.
Understanding Martech Complexity
Martech complexity refers to the systemic difficulty organizations face in managing, integrating and extracting value from their marketing technology investments. This complexity stems from overlapping functionality, incompatible data structures, inconsistent governance and the human limitations of teams tasked with managing sprawling digital ecosystems. Complexity grows as organizations scale without clear architectural plans or cross-functional ownership.
What Drives Martech Complexity?
One clear manifestation of that complexity is tool sprawl. Research from ZoomInfo indicates the average organization uses about 75 different martech tools, despite there being over 8,000 available in the marketplace. Two-thirds of marketers say they use 16 or more tools, often for overlapping functions like email, content management, analytics and segmentation. These redundancies generate friction such as inconsistent workflows, duplicate data sets and steep learning curves that slow down execution.
The Human Factor: Skills Gaps and Underutilization
Another challenge is underutilization, which highlights the gap between potential and actual value. Gartner reports that only one-third of martech capabilities are being used today, down dramatically from previous years. This represents a concerning trend that has persisted for multiple consecutive years, with utilization rates dropping from 58% in 2020 to 42% in 2022, and finally to the current 33% level. The problem is not that the tools lack power. It’s that organizations lack the infrastructure, proficiencies, governance and integration to make use of them.
Data fragmentation compounds the challenge even further. As tools multiply, they create isolated data environments that inhibit unified measurement and personalization. When multiple platforms monitor the same customer or campaign activity, they often produce conflicting insights. According to one report, 70% of marketers say identifying audiences across touchpoints has become harder than ever. Fragmentation directly undermines the purpose of martech, which is to build a coherent customer view across the journey.
A Final Note on Organizational Readiness
A final factor is the skills gap, a huge structural barrier. Research findings confirm that nearly 64% of organizations acknowledge a significant lack of internal marketing technology, data, or marketing operations expertise. This statistic emerges from multiple industry studies examining the critical skills gap plaguing the marketing technology sector.
According to a comprehensive study by Mirum, 64% of marketers believe a lack of internal skills represents the major hurdle for marketing technology growth in organizations.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
