What Is a Martech Stack? How to Build One That Works

Today’s marketing technology stacks (or martech stacks, for short) have become a patchwork of disconnected tools and siloed platforms.

Part of that has to do with the number of tools available. In 2011, when Scott Brinker—the “Godfather of Martech”—released his first Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, only 150 solutions existed. By 2025, that number had exploded to 15,384, representing a mind-boggling 10,156% increase.

But it also comes down to how they integrate.

According to EMARKETER, studies show that martech stacks seldom underperform because of weak tools. Instead, weak infrastructure, fragmented data, and misalignment prevent companies from harnessing their technology effectively.

Email marketing software, customer relationship management systems (CRMs), data warehouses, and advertising technology often struggle to work together. Even when they do, marketing teams spend countless hours reconciling data, duplicating workflows, and managing integrations. That’s time that could be spent on strategy.

As a result, customer journeys become fragmented, and personalization—the very promise of martech—falls short as marketers waste resources trying to stitch everything together.

With 61% of marketing professionals saying their martech stack is only “somewhat effective,” there’s clearly room for improvement.

This guide provides an outcome-focused blueprint for building a sustainable martech stack that unifies data and improves campaign performance.

Read on to learn why most martech stacks underperform, what leading marketers do differently, and how to build a martech stack that fuels growth instead of friction.

But first, let’s clarify a few things.

What Is a Martech Stack?

A martech stack is the set of marketing tools and platforms that businesses use to reach, engage, convert, and retain their target audiences. These tools typically span key functions such as audience targeting, content creation, campaign execution, and performance tracking, covering the full marketing lifecycle.

The tools you use and the size of your martech stack can vary drastically depending on your industry, business model, and growth goals.

For example, a B2B software company may emphasize sales and marketing alignment, lead nurturing, and account-based marketing. To support these goals, they often adopt CRMs like Salesforce, marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, and lead-scoring tools that help move prospects down the funnel.

Meanwhile, a B2C e-commerce brand might prioritize scale, engagement, and personalization. They can build organic awareness through social media platforms, use demand-side platforms (DSPs) to reach new customers, and apply dynamic creative optimization (DCO) tools to deliver tailored product ads that boost conversions.

Whatever the mix, when integrated correctly, a martech stack can provide deeper insights, increase engagement, and improve customer satisfaction. 

What Are the Key Components of a Martech Stack?

Most martech stacks are built around six core categories of tools:

Audience and Data Management Tools 

Unifies customer data through CRMs, customer data platforms (CDPs), and account-based marketing (ABM) platforms to enable collection, activation, and targeting.

Examples: Salesforce, Segment

Campaign Execution and Automation Tools

Automates workflows and enables marketers to scale multi-channel campaigns through marketing automation platforms.

Examples: HubSpot, Braze

Content Management Systems (CMS) and Content Distribution Tools

Provides the ability to create, publish, and amplify content across channels with CMS, video hosting platforms, and social media management tools.

Examples: WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal

Adtech and Media Buying Tools

Ensures effective planning, activation, and measurement of campaigns across channels through DSPs, social ad platforms, and ad verification tools.

Examples: StackAdapt, Facebook Ads Manager, DoubleVerify

Organic Search and Visibility Tools

Enables discovery and growth by improving rankings, optimizing paid search, and enhancing visibility through SEO, SEM, and AI-driven search tools.

Examples: Semrush, Ahrefs, Conductor

Analytics and Reporting Tools

Provides insights into performance, ensures accurate tracking, and enables growth through web analytics, conversion optimization, and journey mapping software.

Examples: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely

Here’s a skimmable summary table for the six core components of a martech stack:

Component	Primary Function	Example Tools
Audience & Data Management	Unify and activate customer data	Salesforce
Campaign Execution & Automation	Automate workflows and scale campaigns	HubSpot
CMS & Content Distribution	Create, publish, and amplify content	WordPress
Adtech & Media Buying	Plan, activate, and measure campaigns	StackAdapt
Organic Search & Visibility	Improve rankings and optimize search	Semrush
Analytics & Reporting	Track, test, and optimize performance	Google Analytics

How Martech Stacks Are Evolving

According to Brinker, for years, martech was divided into “systems of record” and “systems of engagement” (or, more simply, tools that stored data vs. tools that activated that data to reach customers).

Now, he suggests a more helpful way to think about it is “systems of truth” and “systems of context.”

Systems of truth are the foundation. They make sure your audience data and campaign metrics are accurate and consistent, so you’re not wasting resources on duplicate records, mismatched audiences, or unreliable reports. Think of your CRM or CDP—tools designed to serve as a single source of truth.

Systems of context are where the action happens. They take that reliable data and put it to work—powering programmatic ad buys, personalizing website experiences, optimizing creative, or helping teams deliver the right message at the right time. Your DSP falls into this category—it’s built to activate data in context.

This shift also changes how we should picture the modern martech stack. It’s not a rigid, top-down “stack” of tools. It’s more like a connected network, with systems of truth at the core keeping data clean and aligned, and systems of context surrounding them to activate campaigns across channels.

When these two layers work together, marketers can focus less on fixing broken integrations and more on driving growth through personalization at scale.

Why Most Martech Stacks Fail

Although marketing budgets remained flat at 7.7% of overall company revenue for the second year in a row, martech remains one of the few areas where investment continues to grow.

According to Statista, martech spending in the US grew from $21.14 billion USD in 2022 to $27.11 billion USD in 2024—a 28% increase. More recently, a study from Ascend2 found that nearly half of marketers were allocating between 20% to 40% of their budgets to martech in 2025.

Despite the increased investment, performance and productivity gains have not kept pace.

Research from Gartner found that the share of marketers using martech stacks to their full capabilities decreased from 58% to a third in 2023. That usage gap widened the following year, with Ascend2 reporting that only 32% of marketers reported successfully leveraging their martech stacks in 2024.

The reasons vary—from sheer tech sprawl (marketers reportedly juggle anywhere from 16 platforms in their daily workflow to 75 or more across the company) to leadership changes that drive instability (CMOs at Fortune 500 companies hold one of the shortest tenures of anyone in the C-Suite at 4.3 years on average).

But the deeper issue is that martech and adtech often remain disconnected, leaving customer data fragmented across systems. This fragmentation creates a hidden cost—teams spend more time troubleshooting, reconciling, and re-learning tools than executing campaigns.

Every incoming CMO swaps tools, vendors, or strategies to match their own playbook. But despite the vast array of tools available, only 31% of marketers feel confident in their ability to unify customer data.

Successful stacks build for outcomes, not personalities, ensuring continuity beyond any individual leader. A unified foundation between data and activation solves for both leadership changes and long-term performance, ensuring that marketing strategies outlast any tool or leader. The most resilient stacks are integration-first, outcome-focused, reducing friction and compounding impact over time.

How to Build a Martech Stack: Choosing Technologies That Work Together

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building a martech stack. The right mix depends on your channels, target audiences, and growth goals, shaping the tools you ultimately use to plan, run, and measure campaigns.

Here are eight steps to help you build a martech stack that actually works:

1. Identify Goals and Strategy

Start with your marketing processes and objectives, not the tools. Whether you’re focused on lead generation, brand awareness, or customer retention, your goals will help determine which technologies truly add value. Without knowing this, you risk adopting tools that create more noise than results.

2. Audit Existing Tools

Before adding anything new, take a look at what you already have. Identify redundancies, unused licenses, or tools that don’t integrate well with others. An audit helps you cut costs, consolidate workflows, and identify gaps, while also revealing opportunities to improve your overall martech maturity.

3. Involve Stakeholders and Teams

Your martech stack won’t succeed if the people who use it don’t see value in it. Ask campaign managers, media buyers, and analytics teams what slows them down or creates duplicate work. Their input ensures the tools you choose serve real needs rather than leadership assumptions.

4. Map Workflows and Fill the Gaps

Map how campaigns move from planning to activation to measurement, then plot your tools onto that workflow. This will reveal overlaps, silos, or missing capabilities, and highlight where marketing and advertising tools need to integrate for data to make the most impact. From there, you can eliminate redundant tools and fill the gaps strategically without adding complexity.

5. Establish Budget and ROI

Every tool should earn its place in the budget. Evaluate potential solutions based on revenue impact, cost savings, or efficiency gains, not just the features they provide. Marketers who tie spend directly to ROI are less likely to see their stacks cut in the next budget cycle.

6. Evaluate and Select New Tools

When researching new solutions, prioritize scalability, flexibility, and integration. A tool that fits today but can’t grow with your business will quickly get left behind. Look at customer reviews from platforms like G2, case studies from other brands in your industry, or speak with a specialist to learn how the tool works in practice and could integrate with your existing tech stack.

7. Training and Adoption

Even the best tools are wasted if a team doesn’t know how to use them. Invest in onboarding, appoint internal champions, and lean on vendor support resources, such as online courses or training articles, to help get team members up to speed. High adoption rates are the fastest way to turn martech spend into results.

8. Review and Optimization

Your martech stack isn’t a one-time project. Revisit it regularly to ensure tools are still delivering value and see if better alternatives are available. Ongoing reviews prevent waste and keep your martech stack aligned with shifting business priorities.

Ultimately, growth doesn’t come from adding more tools. It comes from making stronger connections between your data, media, and messaging. The stacks that succeed aren’t the biggest. They’re the ones that work together.

Integration > Selection: Why Connectivity Is the True Stack Multiplier

Although martech spending continues to experience record highs, EMARKETER reports that B2B marketers are reducing complexity following pandemic-era buying sprees by focusing on solutions that unify workflows and reduce duplication while enabling interoperability and full-funnel orchestration.

Speaking on StackAdapt’s The AI Advertising Podcast, Brinker highlighted why flexibility and openness are the real differentiators when choosing the right tools for your martech stack.

“When you think about how you’re designing your martech stack and which products you’re adopting, are they open? Do they have open APIs? Do they allow it to fit into an ecosystem where you can add new things or remove new things relatively easily?” he said. “Even if you don’t necessarily know today what you’re going to want to add and remove a year from now, you can be pretty sure there are going to be things you’re going to want to add or remove a year from now. So if you’ve designed your stack in a way that makes that easier, I think that’s a true competitive advantage.”

The takeaway: building a successful martech stack is less about piling on new tools and more about designing a foundation that can flex and evolve with the business. Prioritize integration across martech and adtech, so audience data, media execution, and creative all inform each other—helping you drive greater impact through connected systems and more efficient execution.

StackAdapt’s new email marketing and orchestration capabilities extend this idea of connectivity by linking programmatic campaigns directly with existing email workflows. Instead of treating email and advertising as separate channels, the integration allows intent signals from email engagement to flow seamlessly into programmatic targeting and retargeting. 

This kind of cross-functional integration keeps the entire customer journey connected, improving user experience while driving stronger campaign performance by:

• Unifying data across channels
• Improving real-time campaign performance
• Personalizing experiences based on user behaviour
• Ensuring governance and compliance

Click to learn more about our platform.

Martech Stack Optimization in Practice

According to Ascend2, although over half of marketing professionals (58%) evaluate or update their martech stack annually, 13% rarely or never review their martech stack, leading to outdated workflows and missed opportunities for growth.

To optimize your martech stack for performance and efficiency:

• Simplify your stack: Consolidate overlapping tools and prioritize platforms that integrate seamlessly.
• Tie spend to pipeline: Invest in tools with clear ROI that directly accelerate revenue growth.
• Upskill your team: Build internal expertise to manage platforms and adapt to change.
• Personalize at scale: Use integrated data and AI-driven tools to deliver campaigns that adapt to user behaviour in real time.
• Automate marketing operations: Streamline workflows with automation to help free teams to focus on marketing strategy and creative impact.

From Tech Stack to Business Strategy

Boards don’t care how many tools sit in your martech stack. They care about their impact on business goals. 

A unified martech system proves ROI, reduces wasted spend, and accelerates growth. It provides the continuity needed to withstand leadership changes, rather than collapsing under its own weight. By aligning spend to an ROI framework, marketers can better justify investments and protect their budgets.

As the digital landscape continues to shift, StackAdapt is evolving with it, expanding our platform to help marketers build a more connected, data-driven foundation. 

When your data, media, and messaging work together, personalization stops being a siloed tactic isolated to email and becomes a consistent experience across every channel.

To learn more about StackAdapt, request a demo.

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