7 Signs Your Martech Stack Needs an Update

An outdated marketing tech stack—with lack of integration, scalability issues and poor data analytics—can hinder your strategy’s effectiveness. By updating your technology, you can improve efficiency, gather better insights and gain a greater competitive edge.

There are any number of reasons why your marketing strategy isn’t achieving the results you had hoped for. For example, your strategy might be attracting the wrong users. You could be too focused on transactional marketing instead of relationship marketing. Or you may not be using the right channels to engage with target users.

In some cases, it’s not the strategy you’ve come up with or the content you’re creating that’s leading to disappointing results. Instead, it’s the technology that’s holding you back.

But how do you know if that’s the case? And if it is, which part of your marketing technology stack is the problem? Does one app need to go or do you need to scrap all of it and start over?

In this post, we’ll look at seven telltale signs that your technology is working against you and what you should look for when seeking out replacements.

7 Telltale Signs Your Martech Stack Needs to Be Updated

Does it feel as though you and your team are working way too hard for the kinds of results you’re seeing? Here are some signs that your marketing tech is likely to blame and needs replacing ASAP:

1. Your Tech Costs More Than the Profits You Generate

Return on investment (or ROI) matters a ton. Because if you’re not making a hefty profit compared to what you spent to get it, then something is very wrong.

To start, the costs of your marketing technology should never be more than the profits you generate from your marketing. To make sure this is the case, use this simple formula:

Gross Return - Cost of Martech = Net Return

When running this calculation, use numbers are from the same time period. For instance, let’s say 2024 was your first year in business and your company made $51,000 (your gross return) from all your marketing efforts. Your marketing apps altogether cost you $31,500.

This would mean you had a net return of $19,500 in 2024.

The good news is that you didn’t overspend on martech. But is it all good news?

If you think of it from the standpoint that you had less than $20,000 to pay for everything else once your martech costs were covered, it might not be.

You also have to consider what percentage of your initial investment you’re getting back. To calculate the ROI, use this formula:

Net Return ÷ Cost of Martech × 100 = ROI

So, you’ll take the net return number from above ($19,500) and divide it by the full cost of your marketing tech stack ($31,500). It comes out to about 62% return on your initial investment.

A more accurate way to determine if you’re getting a good return on your marketing investment is to factor in all the other costs you incur throughout the year. Like employee salaries, taxes and benefits. The cost of your office space and equipment is another.

If you’re still making a healthy profit, that’s great. However, it’s also a good idea to consider what percentage of your marketing spending is going toward technology and if it’s too much compared to what little you’re getting in return.

If so, you may want to consider more affordable martech alternatives or to consolidate your technologies into fewer systems.

2. The Learning Curve Is Too High

Most apps have a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning. But if you’re continually finding that your marketing technologies are too difficult for your team to use, then it’s time to consider other options.

There are a number of ways to evaluate the learning curve.

The first is to assess how long it actually takes to get new team members onboarded and trained on the software. When scaling marketing, it’s not just the amount of content you create and publish that needs to be scaled, it’s the team that manages it, too. And if it takes more than a week or two for team members to get the hang of a tool that’s going to be essential to their job, it’s definitely costing you.

Another thing to think about is how long it takes your team members to get work done compared to what they were doing before, whether the tasks were manually completed or done with other software.

If you don’t have anything to compare this to, then it might be difficult to decide if a piece of tech is slowing your team down. That said, you can always compare task completion rates of different team members. If you find there are huge disparities in what certain people are able to accomplish but their outcomes are more or less the same, then the tech is likely the problem.

After all, your marketing tools shouldn’t just be easy for some of your users to master. This is especially so if you have different teams using your marketing tools. The learning curve and ease of use should be relatively the same.

One last thing to consider is if your team seems super resistant to using any of the tech in your stack. I’m not talking about one or two outliers who are resistant to change. I’m referring to a good number of team members who struggle with the tech and have valid complaints about it.

Even if your martech does help you achieve your desired outcomes, it shouldn’t come at the expense of your team’s time or energy.

3. Your Team Has to Do Manual Workarounds

Have you closely examined your marketing processes? Are there certain things that your team has to do manually? If so, why is that?

There may be some tasks that will always need to be managed by hand, and that’s fine. So long as you’re not missing out on an opportunity to digitize and streamline a task, keep doing what you’re doing.

It really becomes a problem when the task is manually done because the software isn’t sufficiently getting the job done.

For example, let’s say you have a lead generation form on your real estate website. It asks for the basics like Name, Email and Phone Number. It also collects other details about the lead’s home buying interests, location, budget and so on.

For some reason, your CRM isn’t capturing all of the details. The form seems to be synced up to the software correctly, but the data is missing. Your team has had to establish a workaround, importing the lead data into a Google Sheet using Zapier. Then the admin goes in once a week to cross-check and fill in the missing details in the CRM.

If your technology isn’t making your life easier and is forcing your team to manually work around errors or inconsistencies, then it’s time to find a replacement. Not only is it creating extra work and eating away at your profits in the process, it’s adding a potential element of human error to the mix.

What your solution is depends on what the source of the problem is. You may need a more reliable and modern CRM or a form that more seamlessly integrates with it.

4. Integration Is Difficult

On a related note, let’s talk about integration. It’s not just faulty integration that can wreak havoc on your marketing processes. A lack of integration can, too.

There’s nothing simple about marketing these days. And unless you find yourself an all-in-one software, you’re going to need tools that can talk to all the others you’re using.

Let’s use the example of a landing page for a high-ticket online course. You built it within your CMS. There’s a certain payment processor your boss wants you to use, but the checkout form doesn’t look great and you’re worried it’ll cost you sales.

Then there’s the fact that the form doesn’t sync with your email marketing software. You have the course scheduled to go out once a week via a drip campaign. There are other reminder and upsell emails that go out on occasion, too. However, in order to trigger the drip, the software needs to know when someone has purchased the course.

Now, this is a bit of a complicated example, but you can see how a so-so integration with a payment processor could be hurting your outcomes. Then, add to that a lack of integration between your form and email marketing tool, and you’re going to end up creating a bunch of extra work for yourself.

You can’t afford to have inefficiencies like this in your marketing flow. If a task can easily be automated with another tool, then the decision is a no-brainer. Ditch the tool (or tools) that won’t integrate with the rest of your stack and adopt ones that will. You have more important matters to deal with.

5. Your Martech Features Are Secretly Costing You

Have you given each of the tools in your marketing stack a close look? Regular martech audits are a great way to zoom in on what each tool offers you in terms of features and functionality, which ones you’re using, and where there are missed opportunities.

For example, let’s say you’ve calculated your tech-specific ROI and you’re pretty satisfied with it. But upon closer inspection during your audit, you’ve discovered the following:

• You’re paying for two social media management tools that do more or less the same thing.
• You have a scheduling tool for new lead consultations, but it doesn’t sync with Zoom, so you’re having to manually create your meeting rooms.
• You have an expensive SEO tool which has been helpful for keyword research, but your team doesn’t use the other features.
• Your team is using Google Docs to write web copy, Grammarly to proofread it and your CMS (which has a built-in writing space and AI editor of its own) to publish.
• You pay for a conversion rate optimization tool to do A/B testing, but you have no need for any of the other features.

This tech stack might be getting you decent results. But based on what we see here, it’s stealing away bits of your profits and efficiency.

When doing a martech audit, there are a number of things you’ll want to watch out for.

One of the biggest red flags is redundancies. If you have tools with the same features and functionality, why pay for both?

Also, look for tools where you’re not using more than 80% of its features. You can likely find a simpler tool or an all-in-one solution with the features you actually need.

But don’t be so quick to write off a tool that’s not being fully used. First, consider what the other features are. Would it be advantageous if your team started using them? If so, start incorporating that functionality into your process.

One last thing to look for are feature sets that are outdated. While older tools might help you accomplish the basics, you could be experiencing much more success and growth by investing in tools with modern features like AI, omnichannel user tracking, segmentation and personalization, and so on.

6. Scaling Is Not in Your Future

Something else a martech audit is good for is figuring out where your limitations are.

It’s not uncommon to go for the cheapest and simplest solutions when you’re first starting out in business or in marketing. Unless you have a surefire marketing strategy, it could be too risky investing in enterprise software from the get-go.

But, again, are you going to be content with marketing tools that get you just OK results? Or do you want to be able to innovate and utilize technology that pushes your marketing strategy to the next level?

So, before you evaluate your tech stack, come up with a list of marketing goals.

• What do you want to achieve overall for your brand?
• How do you plan to do this with each channel?
• What key performance metrics will you monitor to see if you achieve these goals?
• And how will you shift these goals over time? In 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and beyond?

Then, take a look at each part of your stack and ask yourself if it’s up to the challenge. If it will force you to compromise, you risk your marketing strategy stagnating while the competition pulls ahead. It might cost some extra money now to replace the outdated or insufficient tech. However, if it’ll optimize your marketing strategy, you’ll reap the rewards of it over the long run.

7. Analytics Are Hard to Track or Understand

One last sign that your marketing tools are holding you back is that you’re not getting much from your analytics. This could be for a number of reasons:

• The tool doesn’t provide you with full insights into what’s going on.
• The data isn’t organized well or easy to understand.
• The data seems to be inaccurate or unreliable a lot of the time.

Another reason why you may be reevaluating your marketing tech is because you have too much data from disparate platforms.

You could very well be getting good insights about what’s happening with your Facebook posts from Meta. But your users’ engagements with your brand typically aren’t relegated to a single channel. They discover you in one place, interact with your content and then maybe hop over to another channel or convert.

Without marketing tools that provide you with multichannel insights, it’s going to be impossible to really know what’s happening along the user journey. Or to create tailor-made experiences that get users back on track when they’ve gotten distracted or become disengaged along the way.

While not every marketing tool in your arsenal needs to be equipped with this level of insight, you should have at least one cross-channel/omnichannel marketing platform that does. Without it, your marketing strategy will never be able to live up to its potential.

Wrapping Up

Working hard, but not seeing the kinds of results you hoped for or even expected? I know the thought of replacing a piece of technology from your stack is not the solution you wanted to hear. The money you spent and energy you invested to get everyone onboarded with what you have—what was it all for?

Like with everything in marketing, it’s all trial and error. There’s no guarantee that the strategy you choose, the tech you use or even the people you hire will be exactly what you need. But given enough time, you’ll realize that what you’ve been doing just isn’t working.

Now that you know that something isn’t quite right with your martech stack, you can’t afford to waste any more time. Yes, replacing the tech and getting everyone trained up on a new system and process is going to take time. But if it will help you accomplish your goals more effectively and fully, then it’s time and money well spent.

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