Are you building a better MarTech stack or just adding tools?

With the continued rise in new MarTech platforms and the growing influence of AI, particularly machine learning, marketers face a dilemma: what to adopt, and where to place our bets on the future of marketing.

The latest MarTech map from ScottBrinker of ChiefMartec shows there are now more than 15,000 solutions available to marketing professionals. As expected, one of the fastest-growing areas over the past year is AI. Regardless of how we approach it, certain core elements must be in place if we want to move into the future without being left behind. These foundational components are sometimes offered by a single provider, and other times assembled through a composable approach.

A note on terminology: A composable approach is where we take the best-in-class platforms for all the elements we need to achieve our business goals and integrate them to give a seamless experience for the business users, and customers alike.

With so many niche tools available that excel at specific tasks, APIs and integrations are now critical for harnessing this explosion of technology. In addition to traditional Marketing and Sales alignment, Customer Success and IT are now key players, with IT once again becoming essential to ensure platform interoperability and compliance. Yes, drag-and-drop interfaces for automation and integration are becoming more common, but unless someone technical understands how APIs work and how to troubleshoot them, marketers still have limitations in setting up and maintaining their own integrations.

As composable stacks rise, large single vendors must innovate quickly to keep their features relevant. These composable stacks allow us to adopt best-of-breed tools, following MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless).

With that in mind, let’s explore the core elements required for modern marketing. These form a connected, layered stack that combines to create a powerful whole:

Data Foundation

This is the base layer, containing all customer data. It may be housed in a Customer Data Platform (CDP), or in a data warehouse/lake. If a company already uses a data warehouse for reporting, this can often be leveraged, offering a single point of storage and avoiding the overhead of syncing multiple databases. This layer ensures all teams work from the same clean, complete dataset across the business. It includes first-party data from web, mobile, CRM, and transactions, as well as second- or third-party data for enrichment.

The result: a consolidated, 360° view of the customer.

Unified Customer Profile

This sits atop the data foundation. In a CDP with its own database, this layer is bundled in. In a composable architecture, a platform like Hightouch or Zeotap can serve this function, sitting over the top of the existing data warehouse.

This layer unifies different identifiers (e.g., channel IDs, CRM, in-person records) into a single customer profile, enabling audience understanding and segmentation. At its core, it transforms raw data into an actionable dataset, which marketers and AI models can leverage effectively.

Analytics and AI Insights

With structured data in place, the next layer is intelligence, using AI to generate insights and predictions that guide strategy.

Key areas include:

Predictive Modelling:

• Lead scoring
• Churn prediction
• Propensity to buy
• Advocacy scoring
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) estimation

Segmentation:

• Behavioural groups
• Propensity clusters
• Lookalike audiences
• Next-best-action/offers

In composable stacks, this might involve multiple niche tools, with platforms like Looker for analysis and visualisation, or perhaps Twilio Segment for segmentation (also activation), while in a CDP, these features are often bundled. Regardless, the goal is to make the data meaningful and actionable.

Activation Layer

This layer turns insights into actions. It enables a truly omni-channel approach, delivering the right message, at the right time, via the customer’s preferred channel.

A quick note on terminology:

• Multi-channel: Using multiple channels simultaneously to broadcast messages
• Omni-channel: Coordinated engagement across channels, creating a unified customer experience

Key activation areas include:

• Marketing Automation (email, SMS, push)
• Advertising & Retargeting (social, DSPs, AdTech)
• Personalisation (web, mobile)

Single vendors may offer native capabilities or pre-built integrations. Composable stacks allow selection of best-in-class tools but require integration maintenance. Platforms like Zapier and Make can simplify the integrations.

Journey Orchestration

Think of this as the “brain” of the stack, the top layer that coordinates marketing efforts. It ensures the right message reaches the right person at the right time by reacting to customer signals and events. Historically, journey orchestration was built into marketing automation tools. Now, standalone journey platforms are rising, including those from CDPs and intent platforms like Demandbase and 6sense.

The goal: listen for signals, trigger next-best actions, and execute based on data from earlier layers.

With AI, orchestration becomes smarter, automating workflows, personalising content, and predicting optimal touchpoints. We are moving toward customer-led journeys, not pre-set decision trees.

APIs and Integrations

These are the connective tissue of a composable stack. With new tools launching daily, seamless integration is critical to staying ahead.

Integrations enable:

• Activation across channels
• Data enrichment
• Sales enablement
• Full-funnel reporting
• Automation of routine processes

Platforms like Make and other iPaaS solutions help, but technical skills are still often required for error handling, regular expressions, data transformation and general troubleshooting. While drag-and-drop UIs are improving, understanding what happens when things go wrong still calls for a technical mindset.

Reporting

The final layer is reporting.

While many platforms offer native reporting, few deliver the unified, cross-platform visibility businesses truly need. Vendors like Microsoft (Power BI) and Oracle (Analytics Cloud) and Salesforce (Tableau) provide powerful tools to bridge gaps across their ecosystems. Whether composable or single-vendor, marketing teams need autonomy to create reports that serve their unique business needs. Centralising insights and making them easy to understand, while still deep enough to stand up to scrutiny, is a competitive advantage.

Conclusion

As Scott Brinker's ever-expanding MarTech landscape continues to illustrate, the sheer volume of platforms can feel overwhelming. In this dynamic environment, large vendors may struggle to match the agility of innovative niche startups to provide new functionality, however this needs to be balanced with corporate IT departments approving, integrating and maintaining additional systems.

Selecting the right technology begins not with tools, but with strategy. A clear understanding of business objectives, coupled with cross-functional alignment, must inform any tech decision. Once the strategic goals and specific functional requirements are established, organisations can define the operational requirements needed to support them. Only then does it make sense to assess potential solutions and identify the technologies capable of delivering the required outcomes.

This strategic foundation empowers teams to engage vendors with clarity, requesting targeted demonstrations and evaluating specific capabilities in context. Today’s market offers greater opportunity than ever to craft a tech stack that fits your organisation’s unique needs. The era of adapting business processes to fit rigid platforms is over. Now is the time to build technology ecosystems that truly serve the ambitions of the business.