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What is a Martech Stack?

A marketing stack—also known as a marketing technology stack, or martech stack—is the set of technology marketing professionals use to manage, execute, measure, and improve their marketing efforts.

For established enterprises, martech stacks are a mix of homegrown systems, legacy software, and cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) offerings. The average enterprise marketing organization has deployed more than 100 different tools as part of the marketing stack. And as of 2024, there are an astounding 14,106 different solutions in the martech landscape. That’s a lot of point solutions developed and implemented by third-party vendors, consultants, and in-house IT teams.

CDPs at the Heart of the Marketing Stack

To manage the sprawl and lack of integration between components, enterprises are increasingly looking to customer data platforms (CDPs) to serve as a centralized command and control center for their ever-growing and increasingly complex martech stacks.

Why You Need a Martech Stack

Your marketing tech stack supports all your marketing operation across every phase of the customer’s journey with your brand, bringing the following capabilities and benefits to bear:

Users of the Martech Stack Within the Enterprise

The marketing technology stack is directly or indirectly used by several different organizations and functions across the enterprise. These include:

• Customer Acquisition Teams — Teams and individuals who are responsible for customer acquisition leverage various components of the marketing technology stack to manage and execute digital marketing, affiliate and partner marketing, events, app and website optimization, and much more.
• Brand Marketing & Communications Teams — Brand marketers and communications pros use tools within the marketing technology stack to manage the brand’s presence and marketing strategy on social media, public relations outlets, and traditional mass media such as broadcast TV, radio, and print.
• Marketing Operations — Marketing operations teams use the tech stack to manage and monitor marketing campaign performance, glean insights from customer data and other marketing data, and support the extended marketing team in making optimal strategic and execution decisions.
• Sales — Sales teams use the data captured within the marketing stack to better understand the wants and needs of prospects and customers. This is relevant in both B2C (think of a telecom rep) or B2B marketing (think of a software sales engineer) where the sales rep can use insights about the customers’ interests, behaviors, offers they respond to, the communication channels they prefer, and past purchase history for upselling and cross-selling products and services.
• Customer Service — Customer service professionals increasingly rely on tools within the marketing technology stack to enhance customer retention and loyalty. They use customer insights to identify early signs of churn, personalize service interactions, and promote relevant offerings. Integration with marketing systems ensures a seamless flow of data to improve support experiences and drive long-term engagement.
• Product Marketing — Product marketers play a key role, especially when marketing complex or considered products—such as financial services offerings or sophisticated technology. Product marketers use the martech stack to manage and deploy content marketing techniques that educate prospective buyers on their products’ utility and value.

Typical Components of a Marketing Stack

The marketing technology landscape has significantly developed over the past decade and is now able to optimize any type of business—each company will need to find the perfect martech stack that matches their unique needs. With differing business needs across every enterprise, a wide range of options for how each component of a stack is implemented—and which vendor provides it—it’s nearly impossible for any two companies’ martech stacks to be alike. But across most stacks, you’ll find components that address the following critical areas of modern marketing:

• Data Warehouse or Lakehouse — A data warehouse or lakehouse acts as a centralized repository that consolidates structured and unstructured data from across the business—providing your marketing team with a comprehensive, unified view. By joining customer data with transactional, behavioral, or operational data, marketers can analyze trends, uncover insights, and build more targeted, effective campaigns.
• Identity Resolution Tool — The same customer may be identified as Jay Johannessen in your direct mail database, and Jason Johannessen in your email database. Identity resolution tools use a range of techniques to resolve multiple instances of the same customer into a unique “golden record” identifier, so you can more comprehensively understand the interactions each individual has with your business.
• Customer Database — A customer database is a “mini data warehouse” focused on collecting data about customers and their interactions with your business. The database is typically maintained by a marketing technologist or your IT department, accessed via SQL-based query tools, and has a relatively fixed set of attributes along which marketers can conduct customer analysis.
• Customer Analytics Tool — A customer analytics tool is a specific tool typically used by analysts in your marketing team to submit SQL-based queries to a customer database (and other systems containing customer data) to create and measure the performance of customer segments and lists.
• Marketing Automation Tool — A marketing automation platform takes multi-step or multi-channel marketing processes and enables marketers to set them up to run independently. Some of the earliest marketing automation tools were used to create email sequences that would behave differently depending on how or if a person responded. Since then, automation tools have been introduced to execute content marketing in social media and text messaging as well as execute lead scoring and much more. Typical marketing stacks include multiple specialized tools that can be classified as marketing automation.
• Content Management System (CMS) — A CMS allows a marketer to manage, update, optimize, and test (for example, via A/B testing) content marketing efforts on websites, blogs, or even web and mobile apps where marketers engage customers.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) — Large brands must manage many thousands of digital assets. DAMs are business and marketing tech that make it possible to do so in a centralized repository that is searchable and helps with version control, access rights, and more. So, everyone in the company is always using the latest version of images, logos, and product details as part of their marketing efforts.
• Email Service Provider (ESP) — ESPs are one of many marketing tools that allow marketers to send email marketing campaigns to the recipients of their choosing. The most straightforward enterprise-grade ESPs offer specific capabilities that scale, while more complex ESPs may include marketing automation features, customer attribute creation & management, segmentation capabilities, and automated personalization.
• Tag Management System — Modern websites’ app properties rely on dozens to hundreds of third-party services that are embedded within the property using tags. Rather than individually inserting tags directly into code, tag managers centralize management of these third-party tags acting as a “traffic cop” for real-time data that gets passed to and from a property and third-party providers.
• Web Analytics Tool — Web analytics capture granular details about user activity on a brand’s web properties. Analysis can be conducted within the tool, or the data captured within the tool can be shared out to other analytics systems. Web analytics help marketers understand traffic, user navigation patterns, the quality of the user experience and assist with attribution of campaigns and content to marketing conversions and marketing-driven revenue.
• BI/Marketing Intelligence — Business intelligence (BI) marketing tools are general-purpose analytics systems that access customer databases and data warehouses to build reporting and ad hoc analytics that deliver a broad range of marketing intelligence and insights.
• Advertising Technology — As a martech tool, digital advertising (and digitally managed traditional advertising) is a cornerstone of modern customer acquisition, but it is also becoming increasingly valuable in retargeting existing customers for repeat purchases. Marketers typically employ a mix of display ads, search engine marketing (SEM), ad tracking, remarketing, and attribution tools within the marketing technology stack to achieve their goals.
• Social Media — Modern martech stacks include tools to manage and monitor social posts and activity, measure brand sentiment among social media users, and engage customers and prospective customers in one-to-one and one-to-many conversations.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Most marketers invest in both paid and organic strategies to grow their online presence and acquire customers. SEO is key to increasing organic traffic by ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) for keyword phrases that drive traffic and transactions. SEO tools in the marketing stack are designed to assist keyword research, optimize on-site content to rank for keywords, track and grow backlinks to your web properties, and much more.

From Marketing Stack to Customer Experience Stack

In a recent study, Forrester predicted companies that invest in customer success could see a 107% ROI in three years. A major part of that investment includes prioritizing technology built to drive consistent customer experiences around retention and growth. Putting the customer at the center of everything you do is no longer a consideration but a requirement.

Business leaders in marketing, sales, customer service or other customer-centric roles must deliver on the CX imperative—deploying authentic experiences that set their brands apart from their competitors.

However, traditional martech stacks (containing the components described above) are not designed to place the customer at the center of marketing initiatives. Rather, they are aligned around channel (e.g. web, catalog, store, app) or marketing sub-department (e.g. brand marketing, acquisition, CRM). With data siloed in separate systems, channels and sub-departments, these enterprises are incapable of delivering more than disconnected or fragmented experiences.

Leading businesses are now rethinking their sprawling martech stacks, seeking to transform them into modern customer experience (CX) stacks—where everything you do through technology is aligned and orchestrated around the customer. Departments and channels work together seamlessly, and the customer has one unified, authentic, and personal experience with your brand.

The Rise of AI-Powered CX Stacks

AI is also foundational to the modern customer experience (CX) stack. Traditional martech stacks weren’t built for customer-centricity—they were built for channel execution. Today, AI plays a key role in enabling real-time decisioning, dynamic personalization, and journey orchestration at scale.

That’s why composable customer data platforms (CDPs) are integrating AI capabilities directly into their cores, offering automated data unification, predictive analytics, next-best-action recommendations, and autonomous journey optimization. These platforms don’t just store and segment data—they act on it intelligently across every touchpoint.

Challenges to Achieving the CX Stack

However, turning that vision into reality has proven challenging for many organizations. Those who have tasked in-house developers to drive the transformation have found that the rigidity of homegrown solutions makes it too difficult to:

• Handle new, increasingly complex data formats that must be integrated
• Interoperate with new systems and tools being brought online at a rapid pace—especially where data must be activated into a new customer touchpoint
• Deliver a sufficiently high-quality user experience to drive overwhelming adoption among business users

Organizations that have turned to marketing cloud mega-vendors have also faced significant challenges. These include:

• A lack of interoperable applications and data models
• Inconsistent user experiences
• Major feature and function gaps
• Challenges with customer data portability for scaling personalization across all touchpoints

The Modern Approach to Breaking Silos and Achieving Customer Centricity

To bridge the gaps, connect silos, and remove the roadblocks to achieving customer-centricity, a modern customer experience stack, powered by a composable customer data platform (CDP), is quickly proving to be the preferred approach of CX leaders across industries.

Unlike standard CDPs, these powerful composable CDPs deliver not just the most comprehensive customer understanding but also the ability to put that understanding—or intelligence—into action across every customer experience touchpoint. (Download the CDP Market Guide to learn more.)

A composable CDP sits at the center of your marketing tech stack, acting as the intelligent command center that orchestrates authentic customer experiences. The composable CDP receives information from siloed systems (e.g. data warehouses, marketing cloud, website, POS, etc.) and orchestrates the customer journey downstream, to customer-facing systems that deliver the final experiences to the customer (e.g. CRM, call center, POS, website, ESP, DSP, direct mail, apps, etc.) As a result, your enterprise can:

• Break down data, system, process, and organizational silos that stand in the way to true customer centricity
• Leverage AI to uncover actionable insights from across your stack and activate them in the moment
• Maximize all your existing technology investments, avoiding expensive, disruptive and risky “rip-and-replace” approaches
• Rationalize your martech stack over time, eliminating costly, redundant and outdated systems
• Empower business users with AI-driven recommendations and self-service tools that put customer intelligence in everyone’s hands
• Deliver rapid CX wins, while laying the foundation for continuous CX improvement that enables you to compete and win on authentic customer experiences

Learn more about composable CDPs, and how they can transform your organization by reading the CDP Market Guide.