MarTech, or marketing technology, is the all-inclusive term for the software and digital solutions that support marketing operations. Martech tools support all areas of marketing including social media management, content marketing, email marketing, and data management.
Scott Brinker, Editor of the chiefmartec.com blog, identified more than 8,000 MarTech solutions in his 2022 marketing technology landscape graphic.
Common Examples of Martech
Marketing tech solutions exist to support each area of marketing operations. They’re able to automate tasks that allow teams to operate more quickly and scale marketing operations to keep pace with business growth.
Common MarTech solutions include:
- Customer relationship management platform (CRM)—A single platform to help sales and marketing teams track and manage engagement with prospects and leads along their customer journey.
- Customer data platform (CDP)—A platform that connects to multiple other data sources across an organization, integrating structured and unstructured data to build a single customer profile.
- Data management platform (DMP)—A platform used in advertising and marketing to build profiles of anonymous individuals, store summary data about them, and share the data with advertising systems.
- Content management system (CMS)—A platform to build and manage content-driven websites.
- Digital asset management system (DAM)—A platform to store and manage content assets that can also act as a database for the content appearing on your website.
- Social media management (SMM) platform—An SMM tool that allows social managers to schedule posts, respond to messages and comments, conduct social listening (learning what others are saying around topics that matter to your business), and manage audience growth all in one place.
- **Email marketing service (EMS)—**A platform to plan, schedule, and automate emails and email sequences while growing a list of subscribers. It’s a powerful tool for sharing calls-to-action and moving audiences further down the marketing funnel.
CDPs as the Connective Tissue of the MarTech Stack
The central challenge of any MarTech stack is data fragmentation. Each tool collects its own customer data, creating silos that prevent a unified view of the customer. A customer data platform serves as the connective layer that unifies data across all MarTech tools, feeding clean, consistent customer profiles back to every system in the stack.
Without a CDP, MarTech tools operate in isolation. The CRM knows about sales interactions, the email platform tracks opens and clicks, the web analytics tool records browsing behavior, and the ad platform manages campaign exposure. None of these systems can see the full customer picture. A CDP ingests data from all of them, performs identity resolution to match records across systems, and makes unified profiles available for data activation back to every tool.
This architecture is increasingly critical as MarTech stacks grow. According to a report from McKinsey & Company, data unification is essential for enabling personalization at scale, which has the potential to create trillions of dollars in new value across industries. McKinsey specifically identifies CDPs as one of the key platforms needed to support real-time engagement between channels, breaking down silos and allowing for personalized customer experiences.
As the industry moves toward agentic CDPs, the CDP’s role in the MarTech stack is evolving from passive data hub to active orchestrator. AI agents can access unified customer data and autonomously coordinate actions across the entire MarTech stack, from triggering emails to adjusting ad bids to updating CRM records, all without manual intervention.
FAQ
What is the difference between MarTech and AdTech?
MarTech covers tools for planning, executing, and measuring marketing across owned and earned channels, while AdTech focuses specifically on paid advertising. MarTech includes CRM, CDP, email marketing, and content management systems. AdTech encompasses demand-side platforms, ad exchanges, and programmatic buying tools. The two increasingly overlap, but MarTech addresses the broader marketing stack while AdTech centers on media buying and ad delivery.
How do you build a MarTech stack?
Building a MarTech stack starts with identifying core marketing goals and anchoring around a central data platform. Most organizations use a Customer Data Platform or CRM as the data hub, then layer on specialized tools for email, social media, content management, and advertising. The key is prioritizing integration between tools so data flows seamlessly and teams can act on unified customer insights.
How many MarTech tools does a typical company use?
Enterprise marketing teams typically use dozens of MarTech tools, with some large organizations managing over 100 solutions. However, tool sprawl leads to data silos, integration challenges, and wasted spend. Many companies are consolidating their stacks around integrated platforms like CDPs to reduce complexity, eliminate redundant data copies, and improve the quality of their first-party data.
Related Terms
- Marketing Automation — Core MarTech category that automates campaign execution and workflows
- Data Integration — Connects disparate MarTech tools into a unified data ecosystem
- Marketing Analytics — Measures performance across the MarTech stack
- Suite Tax — Hidden cost of enterprise MarTech suites that bundle unused capabilities
- Data Activation — Pushes unified customer data into MarTech tools for campaign execution