As a marketing technology professional or leader, it’s crucial to keep a keen eye on how peers and competitors are allocating their budgets.
Currently, the average expenditure on marketing technology (martech) constitutes 19-20% of the overall marketing budget. By 2029, projections indicate that this figure will surge to around 31%. This increase is both appropriate and necessary as automation, artificial intelligence, and data enrichment grow increasingly vital to our roles within organizations.
But despite marketing leaders’ escalating investments in technology, audits reveal that a staggering ~44% of the existing marketing stack remains unused. If we change that metric to represent “underutilization,” the number jumps to 56%–more than half of our martech stack is being underutilized, according to organizations’ own CMOs.
“Considering all the martech tools purchased by your company, what percent is your company currently utilizing in its operations?”
An unused tech stack translates directly into a waste of marketing’s technology budget, and in an economy where marketing is being tasked with creating radical new efficiencies with technology, the outcome is clear. We can all pity the CMO who finds themself in the position of having to justify ongoing investments when half their existing tech spend is being lost to poor adoption, implementation, and integration.
As we look toward 2029, marketing departments face a significant dilemma: optimizing our tech stack utilization must become a primary Objective and Key Result (OKR). Otherwise, we’ll fail before we even begin.
Why Martech Utilization Matters
The increasing investment in martech isn’t just a trend—it’s a necessity. Automation and data enrichment are not just buzzwords; they are the backbone of modern marketing strategies. These tools enable us to deliver personalized experiences at scale, measure performance with unprecedented precision, and pivot strategies in real-time based on data-driven insights.
They’re also part of marketing’s future. Like every industry around us, marketers will be asked (are already being asked, in most cases) to identify the pieces of their workflow that they can delegate to AI effectively. Even today, there are massive disruptions to our field. If marketing leaders intend to leverage AI and stay relevant, they’ll need to be masters of change management, process, and yes, technology adoption.
The Cost of Underutilization
The cost of underutilized martech tools extends beyond wasted budget. It hampers our ability to execute integrated marketing campaigns, stifles innovation, and undermines the potential ROI of our tech investments. It can also lead to fragmented customer experiences and inconsistent messaging, eroding brand trust and loyalty.
As marketing leaders, we must ask ourselves: Why is this happening? The answer often lies in poor adoption strategies, inadequate training, and a lack of alignment between marketing and IT departments. Without a cohesive strategy for martech implementation and integration, even the most advanced tools can become expensive shelfware.
Unfortunately, marketing departments can’t afford shelfware. We have huge mandates from our organizations–to scale pipeline, to deliver revenue, even to revolutionize our own products.
“You wouldn't run a campaign if you knew it wasn't delivering revenue. So why do you own tech that isn't delivering?”
Taking Action: Strategies for Maximizing Martech Utilization
To avoid the pitfalls of underutilization, marketing leaders must take proactive steps to ensure their tech investments deliver maximum value. Here are some strategies to consider:
1. Conduct a Tech Stack Audit: Regularly assess the effectiveness and usage of your martech tools. Identify redundant or underperforming technologies and make informed decisions about which tools to retain, replace, or eliminate. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking this step alone is “enough.” A high number of CMOs report regular tech stack audits while simultaneously reporting high volumes of unused technology. Conduct your audits with a bias for action. If a tool isn’t being utilized, how will you eliminate the spend or lean into change management to ensure adoption? Marketing technology is purchased for a reason, and usually only after long and meaningful deliberation. Chances are, that big problem you were trying to solve still exists.
2. Enhance Training and Support: Invest in comprehensive training programs to ensure your team fully understands how to use each tool. Provide ongoing support and resources to help them stay up-to-date with the latest features and best practices. Most importantly, remember that CMOs cannot be exceptions to the rule. The day of the “brand only” CMO is over. Today’s CMO has to be technologically savvy. If you don’t fully understand how a tool operates as part of your department’s workflow, then that’s a pretty good indicator that your team won’t either. Marketing Operations plays an important part in technology adoption, but they aren’t where the buck stops. As CMO, make it your mission to lead by example. Martech matters. Act like it.
Without a cohesive strategy for martech implementation and integration, even the most advanced tools can become expensive shelfware.
3. Align with IT: Foster a collaborative relationship with your IT department, or even better, go one step further. Purchase your tools with other departments. Modern tooling should have buy-in from sales, marketing, and IT. If you’re making significant technology purchases, consider expanding your buying team. This isn’t about giving away marketing’s power; it’s about holding leaders within the organization mutually accountable for the success of your technology spends. If your marketing tool won’t work unless the sales organization has input accurate deal data and it’s accessible to you in real-time via the CRM, you should have the CTO and the CRO on your buying team. Why? Because they’re responsible for the success of this project too. Work together to ensure seamless integration of martech tools and address any technical challenges that may arise.
4. Set Clear OKRs: Establish clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on tech stack utilization. Your CEO probably isn’t going to review this statistic, but as CMOs, we need to track progress and hold our teams accountable. You don’t have to go all the way into the weeds setting hyper specific goals for each tool, but if you consider a tool critical to meeting your pipeline or revenue for the year, it should have OKRs specifically tied to its utilization, and an individual personally accountable for adoption. At a high level, marketing organizations should track their total tech stack adoption and remain departmentally accountable for that. If you’re consistently not getting ROI from your tooling, something significant has to change. We set OKRs to drive the behavior we know we need to succeed. Based on the data available to us today, it’s clear that we, as marketing leaders, need to drive change around our martech efficiency. This is where we start.
5. Prioritize the Business Outcome: We buy martech not because we want to do something small, but because we see the big picture. An investment in an AI writing tool isn’t about producing more content – It’s about freeing up your top performing communications employees to focus on campaign collateral that you think is going to help you hit your 3x pipeline goal this year. We stop using tech, or in some cases never start, because we didn’t understand the why.
Learning From Marketing Technology Teams Who’ve Been There
What we face within our marketing departments is an instance of glaring inefficiency. The underutilization of martech tooling represents not a failure of technology, but our own failure to prioritize the tech stacks we know we can’t live without. Keep yourself and your team accountable. Our tech spends aren’t going to get any smaller. So either the waste we create keeps scaling with us, or we get smarter about how we make that spend count.
Trusted data consulting firms help us do exactly that, bridging the gap between departments to help marketers, IT, and sales organizations alike spend smarter and build technology that drives powerful business outcomes. Learn how Hakkoda’s marketing technology team helped Topgolf Callaway Brands break down silos between departments and bring leaders across the organization to a shared point of ROI from their tech stack. Marketers don’t have to go it alone–a great partner can bring speed, efficiency, and powerful outcomes. It’s time for CMOs to stop settling for half the value of our tech stack.
Ready to break free of underutilization trends and build a marketing technology stack that drive meaningful outcomes for your business? Talk to one of our experts today.
