What Most Brands Get Wrong About Their Marketing Tech

Why most martech investment underdelivers, and what to do about it.

There are now more than 15,000 marketing technology solutions available. The average mid-sized company uses around 255 apps to run its business. And yet, 54.9% of CMOs report disappointing ROI from their martech investments, with poor alignment to customer needs cited as the primary reason.

More tools. Worse results. The pattern is consistent enough to be worth taking seriously.

The Problem Isn't the Tech. It's the Order of Operations.

Gartner found that marketers use only around a third of their martech stack's capabilities, and that utilisation rate has dropped 42% since 2022. The most common explanation isn't that the tools are bad. It's that they were bought before anyone properly defined what the customer needed.

Platforms get procured to solve internal problems. The customer experience then gets designed around what the tools can do, rather than the tools being chosen to support what customers actually need. McKinsey found that none of the roughly 50 senior Fortune 500 marketing leaders it interviewed could clearly articulate martech ROI. Most stacks were built to support campaign execution, not to connect customer behaviour to revenue. The tools came first. The strategy followed, or never arrived.

Start With the Question, Not the Platform

The best digital strategies begin with a straightforward question: what does the customer need to do, and what's making that harder than it should be?

That question leads you to real answers. A checkout that loses people at step three. A search campaign driving clicks that don't convert. An email sequence firing at the wrong moment. From there, you choose the tools that fix the specific problem. Not the other way around.

Your Customers Don't Care About Your Stack

They care whether the experience is fast. Whether the answers are easy to find. Whether the product does what the ad said it would.

A big stack with weak adoption is just expensive software that nobody fully uses. The brands that consistently perform well aren't the ones with the most sophisticated infrastructure. They're the ones who understand their customer well enough to know which tools are worth buying.

What This Means in Practice

Before investing in another platform, it's worth asking a few things. Do we know where customers are dropping off and why? Are our existing tools actually being used? Is our strategy built around customer behaviour, or around what our current tech makes easy?

The answers usually point to fewer tools, used better, with a clearer picture of the customer driving every decision.

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