Rethinking Martech: Aligning Stack to Strategy

By Adam Picker, Senior Director, Business Development at Material

Marketing technology isn’t usually “broken.” But it can become misaligned. Platforms get added. Teams change. Priorities shift. Sprawl sets in, and over time, the stack stops reflecting the strategy it was meant to serve.

The signs are familiar. Campaigns take longer to execute than they should. Because customer data sits in silos, personalization is talked about more than it’s delivered. Measurement doesn’t tell a clear story, and reporting requires time-consuming reconciliation. Tools with impressive features are underused or misused. The technology exists, but it isn’t working together.

Perhaps none of these problems seem critical on their own. But together, they create drag on your people, your performance and your ability to scale.

This isn’t a failure of software. It’s a strategy drift.

When Strategy Shifts, Your Stack Should Too

Many enterprise teams built their martech ecosystem around a “best of breed” approach: Choose the top tools in each category, connect them as needed and let marketing run.

That worked, for a while.

But customer expectations have evolved — so has the marketing function itself. AI is changing how we target, test and personalize. SEO is being reshaped by generative AI search. Internal teams are under pressure to move faster with fewer resources. Business leaders expect clearer impact from every dollar spent.

In that context, stitching together a loose collection of tools is no longer enough. The resulting static ecosystem lacks the flexibility you need to adapt to internal and external business changes. If your stack wasn’t built with your current strategy – or current business context – in mind, it’s probably slowing you down.

The Right Moment to Evaluate Your Martech

There’s no wrong time to evaluate your martech. But some moments are better than others. Here are a few common signals that it’s time to step back and assess:

• You’re planning a replatform or major digital upgrade.

• You’ve invested in a customer data platform (CDP), marketing automation or other data tool but haven’t activated it fully.

• Personalization is a strategic goal, but you’re stuck on step one.

• Your team has grown, reorg’d or inherited a stack that doesn’t quite fit.

• Tools are in place, but results aren’t improving (or can’t be accurately reported).

It’s easy to delay stack evaluation because nothing is visibly broken. But that delay carries a cost. The longer you wait, the more complexity gets baked into the system.

What a Modern Martech Assessment Looks Like

A martech evaluation is about aligning what you have with what you need. That starts with understanding your current state through the lens of business outcomes.

• Clarify the business goal(s): Anchor the whole evaluation process in the real objectives marketing is responsible for. Acquisition growth, lead velocity, retention, engagement and revenue are good anchor points. Don’t just list KPIs. Get crisp on the use cases that matter for goals — for example, personalized onboarding journeys, multichannel campaign orchestration or self-service reporting for regional teams.

• Map what you’ve got and who uses it: Inventory the tools, how they’re used and by whom. Understand data flow, platform dependencies and overlap. Cross-check the work with stakeholders in multiple departments. Then go deeper. How are tools connected (or not)? Where does data pass cleanly, and where does it stop? How many CRMs or other redundancies are in play? Which platforms are used daily, and which are shelfware?

• Score capabilities against needs: Don’t score tools on features or audit tools in isolation. Evaluate them in context of the outcomes you need to drive. Is your CMS slowing content velocity? Is your CDP connected to activation channels? Are analytics platforms trusted by both marketing and business teams? Build a heat map that shows where functionality exists, overlaps or is missing entirely.

• Uncover friction points and functional duplication: Manual workarounds, duplicate systems, orphaned data: This is where misalignment hides. Are teams using manual workarounds because integration is too hard? Are multiple tools doing the same job across regions? Is personalization stalled because taxonomy is broken or ID resolution isn’t working? This step reveals where effort is wasted and where investment is under-leveraged.

• Define the target state: Think modular. Define the roles your systems need to play. Don’t aim for a perfect end state; instead consider a composable architecture that allows for flexibility and phased evolution. Define the core capabilities required (e.g., orchestration, content ops, segmentation, decisioning) and map tools to those jobs by value. By defining your target state, you can prioritize what’s needed now, determine what can be staged for later and remove whatever’s unnecessary.

Better Alignment Starts with Better Questions

One benefit of a martech evaluation is the way it clarifies conversation across teams. When done well, it becomes a shared effort across marketing, IT, data and digital.

Instead of debating tools, teams can align on what the stack needs to enable:

• Do we have a unified view of the customer?

• Can we activate that data across touchpoints?

• Are we set up to test and learn quickly?

• Do our platforms help us move at the pace we need?

These are strategic questions. And they often surface deeper truths about roles, resourcing, workflows and governance.

Martech Evaluations Are About Outcomes

Rethinking martech is rarely about starting over. It’s about making sure your stack reflects your strategy, supports your teams and enables the kind of customer experience you want to deliver. Technology doesn’t unlock value on its own. It needs clarity, coordination and intent.

So if your stack isn’t delivering, step back, realign and build forward with purpose. Because the goal isn’t a better stack. It’s better results. And if you need help doing so, contact us today. Material’s experts can guide you through a martech evaluation tailored to the unique challenges and goals of your business.