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Modern marketing runs on technology. But building the stack that powers it – and keeping it running – is one of the most complex, costly, and continuous challenges a CMO faces.
The process is rarely straightforward. You need to diagnose the right problems before reaching for a solution, vet tools against real business needs, and ensure everything connects cleanly – across your department and beyond. Then there's the human side: making sure your team can actually use what you've bought.
And it never really ends. As your organization evolves, so does the pressure on your marketing function. The gaps tend to grow faster than you can fill them – 61.9% of CMOs believe their current stack already has holes in it.
How CMOs respond to that pressure varies wildly. Some chase the bleeding edge. Others swear by what's proven. Most are somewhere in between, improvising as they go.
This guide cuts through the noise. Drawing on real CMO experience, it's a practical framework for thinking about – and building – a marketing tech stack that actually works.
Charley Gale
Martech stack vs. marketing ecosystem
Before diving into stack planning, it helps to clarify two terms that often get used interchangeably but mean different things in practice. Your martech stack refers to the specific set of software tools your marketing team actively uses day to day, the platforms you log into, the systems that hold your data, and the applications that execute your campaigns.
A marketing ecosystem, by contrast, encompasses a much broader network: it includes your stack but also extends to external partners, agency relationships, media channels, data providers, customer touchpoints, and the various third-party platforms where your brand shows up.
Think of the stack as what you own and operate directly. The ecosystem is everything your marketing efforts touch, whether you control it or not. Your CRM is part of your stack. The social media platforms where you run paid campaigns are part of your ecosystem. Your marketing automation tool sits in your stack. The review sites where customers talk about your product belong to your ecosystem.
This distinction matters because decisions about your stack should account for how those tools connect to the broader ecosystem. A CRM that cannot integrate with your advertising platforms creates friction in the ecosystem, even if it works perfectly as a standalone tool.
Similarly, choosing a content management system without considering how it will feed content to social channels, email platforms, and partner sites means optimizing for the stack while ignoring ecosystem realities.
When you approach stack decisions with ecosystem awareness, you make choices that scale better and create fewer integration headaches down the road. The goal is a stack that serves your team's immediate needs while fitting smoothly into the larger system of relationships and channels that define modern marketing.
How to build a martech stack from scratch: A step-by-step framework
Building a martech stack from scratch means assembling the interconnected tools and platforms your marketing team needs to execute, measure, and optimize campaigns, starting not with software selection but with a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve and how your customers move through their journey with your brand.
The process works best when you follow a deliberate sequence rather than reacting to vendor pitches or chasing the latest tool announcements. As John Manley, CMO at a professional services firm, advises: "First, align business goals and marketing technology upfront, with the leaders of your organization." That alignment prevents the common trap of building a stack that impresses on paper but fails to support actual business outcomes.
Start by documenting your core business objectives and the specific marketing outcomes that support them. Revenue targets, customer acquisition costs, retention goals, and brand awareness metrics should all inform what your stack needs to do.
Next, map your customer journey in detail, identifying every touchpoint where technology could improve the experience or capture valuable data. This mapping reveals the functional gaps your stack must fill.
James Shaw
From there, define your must-have functions, which typically include CRM, marketing automation, analytics, content management, and some form of attribution or reporting.
Evaluate tools against selection criteria that go beyond features: consider integration capabilities, total cost of ownership, vendor stability, and how well the tool fits your team's actual skill level. Integration requirements deserve particular attention because a stack that cannot share data across tools creates more problems than it solves.
Assign clear ownership for each tool, whether that sits with marketing operations, a specific team lead, or a shared services function. Plan your rollout in phases rather than attempting a simultaneous launch of everything, and establish a review cadence from day one.
Manley emphasizes the importance of tying every tool to performance: "We've put together a performance matrix that identifies how we're doing in LinkedIn, Google, Semrush, and Google Analytics to ensure that what effort we're putting into it has some kind of outcome."
For a lean team building their first stack, a practical path might look like this: start with a CRM that handles contact management and basic pipeline tracking, add an email platform with automation capabilities, connect a web analytics tool, and layer in a simple project management system for campaign coordination. Expand from there only when you have clear evidence that a new tool will address a specific bottleneck or opportunity.
What tools should you be prioritizing in a marketing tech stack?
Core components of a modern martech stack
A modern martech stack is built from functional layers, each serving a distinct role in how your team attracts, engages, converts, and retains customers.
Understanding these components helps you evaluate whether your current stack has gaps and where new investments might deliver the most value.
The foundational layer for most marketing organizations is the CRM, which serves as the central record of customer and prospect relationships. Everything from lead scoring to sales handoffs depends on having reliable, accessible data in this system. Closely connected is marketing automation, the platform that handles email sequences, lead nurturing workflows, and campaign orchestration at scale.
Analytics and business intelligence tools form another essential layer. These range from web analytics platforms like Google Analytics to more sophisticated BI tools that pull data from multiple sources and surface insights your team can act on.
As Liz Franzani, a marketing technology leader, notes: "Customer data platforms connect platforms and data sources with that precious first-party data, allowing you to stitch together and create that three hundred sixty degree view of your customers." CDPs have gained significant traction in recent years precisely because they solve the problem of fragmented customer data.
Content management systems handle the creation, storage, and delivery of your digital content, but modern stacks increasingly add adjacent layers.
Franzani highlights the growing importance of digital asset management and content marketing platforms:
"By having a DAM and a CMP, what you start to do is take those digital assets and content as assets and put it in a place that can serve omnichannel where website is just one of those channels."
Attribution and reporting tools help you understand which efforts drive results, connecting marketing activities to revenue outcomes. Experimentation platforms enable A/B testing and optimization across channels.
Collaboration and project management systems keep campaigns on track and teams aligned. And integration middleware, whether that is a dedicated iPaaS solution or native connectors, ensures data flows between all these systems without manual intervention.
Not every team needs every category at the same level of maturity. A startup might run effectively with a CRM, basic automation, and web analytics, while an enterprise organization requires the full spectrum. The key is understanding what each component does so you can make informed decisions about where to invest as your needs evolve.
Marketing tech stacks for remote teams
While remote teams will largely utilize similar tech stacks when it comes to actual marketing, from an operational perspective, there are a few things you should make your absolute priority in order for your team to be able to function well in different locations.
According to experts on managing remote teams, project management systems and asynchronous collaboration tools are an absolute must, along with reporting systems that feedback clear data to you.
Liam Martin, CMO and co-founder of Time Doctor:
"If you were just starting from zero, I'm hopeful that if you're a CMO right now, you have some type of project management system in place, that would probably be the base level one. Some form of communication, both synchronous and asynchronous, so that would be something like email or Slack, which would be more asynchronous, and something like Zoom would be synchronous. That's about it."
Maria Jose Parel, CMO of IVFLife:
“Project Management tools are essential to keep track of all projects and important communications. Furthermore, a solid reporting system is also required to assess the results developed by your actions and helps you make more confident decisions based on how the campaigns are performing.“
And of course, a good video call system and internet connection help avoid frustration during meetings.”
Understanding and using your marketing tech stack
The amount of firsthand experience and knowledge you’ll need for your marketing tech stack will largely depend on the size of the organization you’re the CMO for.
CMOs in early-stage companies and start-ups will likely be building their tech stacks for their own use, as they often have to perform all or most of the organization’s marketing activities.
As your team grows, your tech stack will develop more to suit the needs of the people you manage, and you’ll make less and less direct use of your marketing tech stack.
Instead, you’ll be delegating those duties to leads for different types of marketing. You’ll rely on their feedback on what parts of the tech stack are working and what aren’t, and their advice will be extremely important when it comes to finding new tools to integrate and improve the tech stack.
But how much does a CMO need to really understand how to use the tech stack in those kinds of situations? In early-stage companies, CMOs will likely know their tech stack inside and out and be the foremost expert on all the components.
Even in small teams, you’ll often be the expert your team turns to when they need help with one of the tools, and you’ll be able to jump in and help where necessary across all the various parts of your tech stack.
But as your tech stack and team grow, you’ll likely lose the practical, working knowledge of many parts of your tech stack, and there will be experts in your team who’ll be the first port of call for advice and help. However, that doesn’t mean you can just wash your hands of knowing how your tech stack functions.
As Ionut Danifeld explains:
“As the CMO, you need to have a certain understanding of why it is working, why we should use it. It's an understanding of the tool components from a perspective of a helicopter's point of view. But you really need to learn to delegate.
“For example, I'd like to consider myself an email marketing expert, but the person in my marketing team who is handling day-to-day email marketing is much more of an expert than me.”
Keeping up to date on what your tech stack components do can be very important when it comes to navigating the C-Suite. You’ll often be required to justify the costs of various components and explain their value to other members of the leadership team, like the CEO and CFO.
Being unable to do so could reduce your ability to add further components or replace ones that aren’t working, as you can’t justify the money being spent on the tools you have.
For example, in the case of tech stack components involved with data capture and analysis, you might not know exactly how to work the interfaces, but you’ll need to know how these components capture data (especially important with increasing data privacy laws), how that data is being interpreted, and what the results mean for your organization.
Dan Frohnen, CMO of Upkeep.com expands on why this is important:
“So I think ultimately, a CMO needs to care about the marketing stack and to make sure that what is going into the database is being treated appropriately.
“It's not every single component; it's really just making sure that the core is in place, and then leave it to the professionals to run their business on the RevOps and marketing ops side. But at least, in my opinion, a good CMO that does need to focus on growth is going to go in and validate if there's anything that needs to be there that's not there, and have the support from the CMO to go and get it.
“Because I think one of the things that every CMO needs is data and lots of it to make informed decisions. That's what a tech stack does: it actually flows the data correctly, gives you the insights you need to run the business as effectively as possible.”
A simple martech stack template for small businesses
Small businesses and early-stage companies face a particular challenge when building their martech stack: they need enough capability to compete effectively but cannot afford the complexity, cost, or learning curve that enterprise tools demand. The solution is a focused template that covers essential functions without creating operational overhead.
As John Manley, CMO at a professional services firm, explains when describing his approach to equipping non-specialist teams: "We had to create a suite of tools or at least identify a suite of tools and curate them together that they can use to give them some of the abilities they need."
That curation mindset, choosing tools that work well together and remain accessible to people who are not full-time marketers, is the key to a successful small business stack.
The template below organizes tools by function and indicates whether each category is essential from day one, optional depending on your business model, or something to add as you grow.
Essential from day one:
CRM: A system to track contacts, deals, and customer interactions. Many small businesses start with HubSpot's free tier or a lightweight option like Pipedrive.
Email and basic automation: The ability to send campaigns and set up simple automated sequences. Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or the email features built into your CRM often suffice.
Web analytics: Google Analytics remains the standard for understanding traffic and behavior on your site.
Content management: A CMS for your website, whether that is WordPress, Webflow, or a similar platform.
Optional depending on model:
Social scheduling: Tools like Buffer or Later help if social media is a significant channel for you.
SEO tools: A basic subscription to Semrush, Ahrefs, or even free tools like Ubersuggest can guide content decisions.
Growth-stage additions:
Dedicated reporting and dashboards: As your data sources multiply, a tool like Databox or Google Looker Studio helps consolidate insights.
Collaboration and project management: Notion, Asana, or Monday become more valuable as your team grows beyond one or two people.
When selecting tools, prioritize those with strong native integrations so data flows between systems without requiring custom development.
A CRM that connects directly to your email platform and analytics tool will save you hours of manual work and reduce the risk of data silos. Simplicity and ease of adoption matter more than feature breadth at this stage, because a tool your team actually uses consistently will always outperform a powerful platform that sits idle.
Assessing your tech stack choices
Once you’ve added something to your tech stack, you’ll need to assess how effective it is in helping you towards your primary objectives. You might want to set a timeline, with clear KPIs, to establish whether the new component is having a positive impact.
If it is, that’s great!
If not, your first instinct might be to drop the component completely. However, doing so might be a little too hasty without first investigating why the component isn’t having the desired effect. After all, many martech solutions have pricing models that mean you might have paid for an entire year of use, meaning you could be wasting money if you haven’t been using it for that long.
It’s far more cost-effective to find out exactly what’s going wrong. Speak to your team about how they’re using the tool. It could be they’re not using it properly, missing key features, or even not using it altogether because they don’t understand it.
That’s where training comes in for your team to properly use their tools. Many martech vendors provide detailed training programs, whether it’s various training materials on their websites, or even having a member of their accounts or customer success team actually run demos for you and your team.
This approach proved fruitful for Ionut Danifeld, but at the same time, he makes it clear that you can’t force your team to use tools they aren’t comfortable with:
“We were investing so much money in all these tools, and we realized that some people were not actually using them. Something I've been saying all the time, a tool is going to show the return on investment at the moment people are going to use it.
“We set up meetings with leaders of the departments, and I had the conversation with the account managers of that specific tool, and I told them, ‘Hey, this person is from, let's say, customer support, here are their challenges. Show them case studies of other companies, how they're using it. Make it as easy as possible, and make them understand that it's actually going to save them time’.
“I think that was something that really worked to actually make them understand that, okay, this tool is not to complicate your life, but it's actually going to help you and make your job much easier. That worked, but it was a process.
“It was solid months, I think half a year. And we actually ditched some tools down the way. Tools were great, in my opinion, but the response was not there, and we had to close them down.”
Common martech integration challenges and how to solve them
Integration problems are among the most persistent headaches in martech, and they tend to compound over time. A stack that works well when you have three tools can become a tangled mess when you have fifteen, with data living in silos, records duplicating across systems, and attribution models that cannot agree on what actually drove a conversion.
The most common challenges fall into predictable categories. Siloed data occurs when tools cannot share information, leaving your CRM unaware of website behavior or your analytics platform blind to email engagement.
Duplicate records emerge when the same contact exists in multiple systems with slightly different information, creating confusion about who your customers actually are and what they have done. Inconsistent attribution happens when different tools use different models, making it nearly impossible to understand which channels deserve credit for results.
Poor sync frequency means data that is hours or days out of date, which undermines any attempt at real-time personalization or timely follow-up. Weak ownership leaves integrations unmaintained, with no one responsible for monitoring whether data is flowing correctly. And over-customization creates brittle connections that break whenever a vendor updates their API.
As John Manley, GVP of Strategy at a professional services firm, observes when discussing transformation readiness: "Evaluate whether your company structure, your culture, and your tech stack are ready for this transformation." That readiness assessment should include honest questions about who will own integrations and how you will manage change as tools evolve.
Solutions depend on the severity of the problem. For straightforward connections between major platforms, native integrations are often sufficient and require minimal maintenance.
When you need to connect multiple tools or handle complex data transformations, middleware solutions like Zapier, Workato, or a dedicated iPaaS platform become necessary. Larger organizations may need RevOps or IT support to build and maintain custom integrations, particularly when data security and compliance requirements add complexity.
Before purchasing any new tool, run through a quick integration checklist:
- Does it offer native connectors to your existing stack?
- What data can it send and receive?
- How frequently does it sync?
- Who will own the integration after implementation?
- What happens to your data if you decide to switch vendors?
Answering these questions upfront prevents the integration debt that accumulates when tools are purchased without considering how they fit into the broader system.
Advanced marketing tech stacks: AI applications and machine learning
With the ever-increasing prominence of AI in martech, you’ll likely be required to investigate these kinds of solutions and their applicability for your organization.
AI can benefit just about every facet of marketing, but it can’t just function on its own. You need to be able to feed the applications the right amount of quality data to get the most from them (making them likely to be an inefficient purchase for very early-stage companies that are yet to build up access to extensive data streams).
Furthermore, as powerful as AI can be, it still requires a human element, as the insights provided are simply that, insights. It’s often down to actual people to put that knowledge into practice.
But with the right processes in place, and properly integrated into your tech stack, AI can be a powerful tool.
Take this example from Randy Frisch, CMO of Uberflip, who shares how AI could enhance how you position and distribute your content:
“We can either be very manual and very thoughtful about the content that we want to put in front of someone, or we can start to leverage AI.
“AI functionality can allow us to match those tags against things like intent. So, suppose you're using a platform like DemandBase, you can actually say, what is this account trending on from a search perspective? What content do I have that matches and actually delivers contextual content in the moment? There are two different extremes there. I would argue that, for people who are trying to do one-to-one ABM, you want a team to be very thoughtful in going through the content that's been tagged and audited.
“But a lot of us are getting into ABM, which is more built into our general approach to demand generation. And with that, we're going to leverage AI and actually be able to do this at true scale.”
Speaking of DemandBase, their CMO, Jon Miller, explained how AI and machine learning can be used for creating account intelligence reports and matching potential accounts to your ideal buyer persona to make your ABM activities more effective:
“Use all your first-party data, the data that you know about the account, from your CRM, from your marketing automation on your website, etc, then combine that with quality, accurate, third-party data.
“Another factor is intent data. A quick definition: third-party intent data is where you're able to monitor what content an account is reading out on the open web, and use that search to find patterns of what topics they are interested in, when they’re searching, and when they’re expressing new interest.
“It's privacy-compliant because you're not tracking individual people, you're just really trying to map to the account level and say, “hey, this account tends to be interested in this kind of stuff.” Intent data helps you with counterintelligence in two ways. One, if an account is reading about cybersecurity, then that tells you something about what they might be interested in. It also suggests language you might use when talking to them.
“And then, as I alluded to, if you see a spike or a trend in research around cybersecurity, for example, that might be a sign that they're entering into the QA stage, and it's time to reach out.
“A third type of account intelligence is just their firmographics: the company information. The industry that they're in tells you a lot about what business challenges they might be facing. I guess I'll wrap this with a category that we've become really interested in, which is technographics or install-based technologies. This is relevant for other technology companies as well. In many cases, knowing the other pieces of technology that an account has installed is one of the most important indicators that tells you if that's a good fit for you.
“Another thing that technographics can be really good for is that you can start to find patterns. Companies actually follow predictable patterns in how they buy technology. If you know they bought this technology, and then technology B, there’s a pretty good chance six months from now they're going to be looking at technology C.”
Both of these examples show the power of AI and its limitations. It can quickly and responsively provide effective insights on your audience, position content on your site to suit their needs, and even make suggestions on the best course of action.
But what it can’t do is do your marketing for you. Someone is still going to have to create the content’s positioning. Someone is still going to have to create ABM strategies based on the insights provided.
Always remember when it comes to AI applications in your marketing tech stack: AI should be a tool for your team, not a crutch.
Is managing tech stacks your entire job as a CMO?
At this point, it’s starting to look like your entire job as a CMO is building and training your team to use your tech stack. Not true!
Focusing too much on tech stacks while ignoring marketing fundamentals can lead you to having a marketing department with lots of fancy bells and whistles, but not much substance.
As Drew Neisser, CEO and founder of Renegade Marketing, and founder of CMO Huddles, explained in his appearance on our CMO Convo podcast:
“Every time you buy marketing technology, you have to add two to three people to use it, but companies don't. If you don't add the people, you're adding technology. Some cases are exceptions to that, where they actually do bring more efficiencies.
“A lot of times, any marketing automation technology requires people to interpret, to put in the content, to analyze it. So, what happens is, you have these massive tech stacks, unsupported by people draining the budget, and lots and lots of data. You're still trying to figure out what's happening here.
“Again, I think there are ways to radically simplify. I don't have a problem with marketing technology. In fact, I think it's amazing. But I think if every CMO did an audit, they could probably reduce their stack by 10 to 20%, have no impact on their marketing effectiveness, and have a huge impact on the bottom line. And they help their employees because the employees who are working in the marketing automation area are dying because they didn't hire enough people.
“You've got overstressed people who are in high demand. Those people are going to leave if they haven't left already, because they can get a $30,000 raise tomorrow, because they're understaffed against the technology that you bought. When you automate tech, you really start to get some budget back that you can actually use for something like media or content, which is marketing.
“Martech isn't marketing. It is a way of helping you facilitate or measure marketing, but it's not marketing.”
So keep that in mind, martech is there to support your team, not do your marketing for you.
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