Marketing teams today are using increasingly complex applications to plan, deploy, and track campaigns across multiple to many channels. This has created unprecedented challenges for creative team members who may not possess the skillset to use, let alone manage, integrate, and optimize high-tech apps.
Like most of us, teams tend to use what they know, and often, new hires will onboard familiar tools, which they feel make them more effective. The outcome is the average business has hundreds of tools that overlap, present integration issues, and waste budget. These are the unavoidable realities of a leaderless techstack.
What is a marketing techstack?
A marketing techstack, or marketing operations tech stack, is a collection of technology tools to power your company’s marketing initiatives and campaigns. It probably includes tools you use for a CRM, email automation solution, analytics, visualization, advertising, message automation, content systems, website, attribution, data piping, datalakes, and more. Tech tool options have grown exponentially over the past decade and a half; expanding from 150 solutions in 2011 to more than 15,000 in 2025.
Organizations now use an average of 162 to 245 marketing tools, depending on size, with more than 62% of companies increasing their tool count in just the past two years. Ascend2
As techstacks continue to expand, businesses are plagued by unused overpurchased licenses, mismanaged user access, automatic renewals, and most importantly feature overlap — all of which are inefficiently sapping your budget. It’s harder than ever to manage licenses, ensure teams use what they pay for, and align technology with strategy.
Studies show as much as 60% of martech spend is lost to underused or redundant apps, while only 17% of leaders say their tools integrate seamlessly. Ascend2+2
functional overlap between CRM and email marketing tools alone
struggle with data integration as their biggest martech challenge
Why should you conduct a marketing techstack audit?
Pendo and the Standish Group conducted separate studies and found that:
- 80% of software features are rarely or never used.
- Only 20% of software features are used regularly by most users.
- Studies show up to 60% of martech spend is wasted on unused or underutilized tools.
With business budgets projected to reach more than $215 billion by 2027, if we assume the average company is only using 20% of its techstack’s capabilities, audits that disclose usage are essential for achieving ROI, reining in waste, and surfacing user and usage inefficiencies. Monthly, or at least regularly conducted audits will disclose redundancies, highlight areas for improvement, present opportunities for integration, and enable businesses to meet objectives for streamlining operations.
Few companies conduct regular tech stack audits. When they do, they are often preceded by a SOC II or other type of regulatory or certification audit, and this is the worst possible time to discover issues.
When it comes to auditing the marketing tech stack, who should be involved, what problems will you uncover, and how can you use an audit to help your business cut costs and boost efficiency? You don’t have to look far and wide for answers. A simple AI prompt discloses key statistics on tool usage, stack complexity, and budget waste that illustrate why an audit should be an essential tool for modern businesses.
Who is responsible for the marketing techstack?
The term marketing operations first drew attention in 2005 after the analyst firm International Data Corporation identified the history and rise of the marketing operations function in its annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. By 2011, marketing operations was recognized as the fastest-growing career. Yet, while the defined role is recent, the underlying concepts can be traced to the Golden Age of Radio in the 20s, driving market research to help advertisers understand customer demographics and competitors.
The drive to separate marketing operations from marketing was led by several factors: technology complexity, need for specialization, hunger for data and analytics, and desire to optimize processes. Though now well-established, it is still evolving.
In organizations with a marketing operations (MOps) team, that group is typically responsible for the marketing techstack (generally in collaboration with the IT group, but not always). Their responsibilities may include vetting, onboarding, managing, administering, optimizing, and aligning technology choices with strategic marketing requirements and channels. These professionals are the bridge between vendors, marketing, IT, data, and analytics that ensures accountability and integrated performance across platforms.
Only 17% of organizations report that all tools in their stack work seamlessly together; marketing operations is tasked with improving this. Business.adobe+1
Why can’t the marketing team manage the marketing techstack?
Marketing focuses on strategy, campaigns, and ideation, while marketing operations focuses on executing these campaigns by choosing tools, managing compliance and accessibility requirements, connecting channels, piping data, and visualizing results.
Marketing operations ensures marketing’s creative goals have a sound infrastructure, reliable and scalable integration, and is surfacing actionable analytics. As marketing techstacks become more complex, this division of duties is critical—marketing operations frees the marketing team to focus on creativity and strategy, while marketing operations focuses on execution across the entire channel landscape.
65.7% of organizations citing data integration as their top martech challenge. Marketingops+1
This delineation is why our team, MKTGWEBOPS, is composed of shared services that include web, content, data, UX/UI, customer experience, and design teams. These teams often share applications, platforms, or workflows, which presents an opportunity for eliminating tool redundancy. Including these seemingly disparate teams in the marketing operations organization enables holistic management, reducing the risk of redundant purchases, shadow IT, or disjointed user experiences. Consolidating these teams can minimize overlap (10-15% overlap between CRM and email marketing functionalities alone), improve efficiency, and support unified data strategies.
never review their stack, missing optimization opportunities
budget increase planned for martech in 2025
Is marketing techstack cost creep really inevitable?
You can avoid cost creep by conducting regular audits — and you don’t have to go it alone. With more than 70 years’ combined experience with hundreds of apps, MKTGWEBOPS dissects complex martech ecosystems into reports that will enable you to optimize your techstack expenses. Our expertise spans marketing, operations, tech evaluation, and change management to deliver insights and keep pace with trends such as API integration (where 87% of stacks face good or less-than-ideal coverage).
Human-led vs AI insight
Our audits are high-level, human-led assessments rather than a cookie-cutter checklist driven by AI. We inventory the marketing techstack and related apps, document licenses and user counts and functional usage, surface overlap and redundancy, and deliver practical suggestions for rightsizing the stack. We focus on saving costs, streamlining workflows, and eliminating tools that don’t contribute to ROI.
Companies use our audits to identify immediate cost savings (removing or renegotiating unused or underutilized licenses), improve operational efficiency, achieve better data quality, and ensure readiness for new technology and updated features such as AI.
What are the next steps?
Request a complimentary MKTGWEBOPS marketing techstack audit. Our process is simple: attend a discovery session, list your marketing techstack, provide license and user data information, and let our team do the rest. After the audit, we will deliver a clear, actionable report specifying cost savings, consolidation opportunities, and paths to future-proof your stack.
If you’re looking for a longer-term solution, the MKTGWEBOPS team is available for short- to long-term contracts or permanent hire. This can be especially appealing to startups and VC acquisitions that need to show immediate ROI. While we are not marketers per se, we have deep marketing experience that includes certifications in the social and search paid ad platforms, social media, email marketing, customer journeys, customer-sentiment, and more. We can assist fledgling marketing teams or take the lead. Start the conversation or download our MKTGWEBOPS one-pager.
We use AI tools to streamline operations, optimize content, and provide a consistent experience. On this page, AI helped us conduct research, outline content, review draft copy, research keywords, optimize metadata or SEO, and review for style, readability, or audience alignment.
Our team reviews and approves every AI-assisted element before publishing to make sure it’s accurate and true to our brand.
Yes, we use AI tools to streamline operations, optimize content, and provide a consistent experience. We believe AI is critical in today’s workflow. AI enables us to automate rote or complex tasks so our team can focus on delivering content and services that only come with decades of experience.
On this page, AI helped us conduct research, outline content, draft copy, research keywords, optimize metadata or SEO, review for style, readability, or audience alignment, and create images.
Our team reviews and approves every AI-assisted element before publishing to make sure it’s accurate and true to our brand.