Less than half of marketers are making use of their tech stack capabilities

Just 42% of marketers have told a survey that they are using the breadth of tech capabilities available to them in their martech stack.

The finding from Gartner – down from the 58% reported in 2020 – is because of a significant overlap across martech solutions (said 30% of survey respondents) and the complexity of their organisations’ martech ecosystem (27%).

Gartner surveyed more than 320 marketers in May and June 2022. Despite a huge investment in marketing technologies – CMOs reported allocating a quarter of their expense budgets into tech this year – 28% of marketers cited a difficulty in identifying and recruiting talent as a barrier to adopting and using the martech stack available to them.

Benjamin Bloom, VP analyst at the Gartner marketing practice, said: “Despite turbulent budgets in previous years and current economic headwinds, tech investments are a priority for CMOs and proving their ROI is more crucial than ever.”

“Yet the challenges associated with martech under-utilisation, such as new business models and disrupted customer journeys, are making it difficult for marketers to demonstrate technology's value.”

The cookieless future

More than six in 10 of the survey’s respondents (62%) said they have deployed, or plan to deploy social commerce technology, with many saying that this was a key tool to support innovative marketing channels.

Almost two-thirds (65%) were exploring or piloting tech associated with advertising execution and measurement in audio and streaming or connected TV, while 62% were exploring or piloting tech to support metaverse advertising and 59% doing the same to enable the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Bloom said: “The fact that marketers are already leveraging technology to support emerging activities underscores their desire to outfox the competition and get a head start on controlling their own destinies in a world of more fallible identifiers.”