In recent years, digital marketing has undergone several transformation processes that are mainly marked by 3 global trends: the dramatic increase of tools and providers, the entry of new standards and business needs and finally the increase in the structural complexity of the Martech structures hired by all types of companies.

According to Chiefmartec, in 2020 the number of Martech solution providers increased by 27.8% to more than 14,000 solutions – a growth of more than 9,000% compared to 150 vendors in 2011. There is no debate: solutions are much more complex, integrations are much more detailed and the differentiation between one solution and another is becoming much more blurred.

This has an obvious impact on the cost side of the business, as technology spending, despite already accounting for 23% of annual marketing spend, is expected to increase, according to LXA.

To this disturbing picture we must add another market data that will surely give more than one CEO a scare: only 42% of professionals make use of 100% of the features present in their Martech stack.

This increasingly trending scenario gives us a clear picture of what will happen in the coming years and is a growing need for the optimisation of Martech structures and their use within organisations and marketing teams and all due to 3 undeniable realities of the current market and operating models.

1. More technology does not mean better results, it does not matter if you hire the cheapest or the most expensive tool, what is really important is how you use that tool. Furthermore, it is very common to find in organisations of all sizes underutilised technologies simply because they are not needed in certain structures. In other words: just because a technology exists does not mean that it is necessary.
2. Liquidity is a handbrake on the market, a fact we see with rising interest rates and funding difficulties that many companies are starting to see already in 2022. Against this backdrop, there is a growing need to reduce operating costs.
3. There is a great difficulty for marketing teams to understand and use all the tools available to them which tends to increase the “overlap” or redundancy of functions between tools – two services doing exactly the same thing in the same budget – making it even more difficult to understand the ROI that each tool brings to an annual marketing operation.
4. Generative artificial intelligence enables the development of customised applications at low cost, generating optimisation opportunities among marketing teams.

This leads to the conclusion that the coming years will be marked by strategies of tidying up, simplification and optimisation of technologies, especially in large companies with significant budgets. In other words:

"All organisations need to evaluate their Martech structures on a technical and strategic level in order to streamline their marketing operations, increase sales and reduce costs all at the same time.

Existing optimisation strategies and methodologies

At the methodological level we can find multiple optimisation methods according to the needs of each organisation. For the purposes of this article we will focus on 4 methodologies useful for almost any situation: Versioned Migration, Structural Reconstruction, Downsizing and Price Breakdown.

Versioned migration

Versioned migration is a method based on constant improvement without a deadline for project completion, i.e. the company tends to optimise its Marketing structure in set periods of time always in a “tik” and “tok” clock rhythm, where the “tik” focuses on adding necessary new functions to the existing Martech ecosystem and the “tok” focuses on reducing and simplifying the structure in order to reduce costs and redundancies.

It is recommended that this operational structure be divided into 4-6 month cycles in order to close projects at specific times. For example:

Fechas	Type of cycle	Project
January to May	Tik	CDP implementation
June to September	Tok	Migration and downgrading of email marketing tool to delegate these functions to the CDP
October to December	Tik	Implementation of a user tracking system on the web.

As we can see, it is always a matter of “adding or improving” new or existing tools and then “reducing or optimising” existing structures so that they cost less.

This strategy tends to have little cost reduction in exchange for high optimisation of the tools. It is usually used in companies with a solid structure and reasonable structuring, so the most important thing is to find a bit of both worlds: cutting costs and expanding functionalities.

Structural reconstruction

This type of methodology tends to be drastic and costly and is usually applied in very chaotic or meaningless structures. It is a methodology usable only in those Martech structures that lack governance, order and configuration. Therefore we are talking about those structures where any partial change process will not be sufficient or will be more costly than a new structure from scratch.

It is normal in this type of structure to have extended periods of time (minimum 1 year) where the new structure is planned and built. Eventually the whole organisation will have to migrate to the new structure.

The disadvantage of this type of reconstruction is the human and financial cost of having to operate two parallel structures for a considerable time. The great advantage is that if the new structure saves at least 30% in licensing costs, it is easy to amortise the investment in such a reconstruction.

Downsizing

Downsizing is a methodology focused on the detection of redundancies and the subsequent unification of services. This is perhaps the most common methodology as it is the one that leads to the greatest cost reduction in the short term.

The principle of downsizing is quite simple, just review the current structure of a company’s Martech tools, detect possible overlaps between them or repeated functions and find the optimal method of unification between them. This may include duplicate licence fees or double implementations within the same company.

The great advantage of this methodology is that it is easy to implement and quick to save, as reducing duplication is, in a nutshell, cutting costs by half. The disadvantage is that it is not a methodology focused on structural changes. This type of strategy applies to companies that need a “quick win” to move towards a much more mature Martech structure.

Price Breakdown

In terms of optimising structures, Martech can also encounter the scenario of “paying more for less”, i.e. having a configuration that is much more expensive than necessary. This happens for different reasons:

1. You pay for a larger and more expensive licence than you really need.
2. Data is measured, implemented or processed that the team does not need, which increases costs.
3. There is poor cost negotiation between the company and the service provider.

This methodology is thorough but effective and allows the costs and configurations of the contracted tools to be aligned with the companies’ business needs.

Conclusions

When it comes to marketing technology, there is a clear need for the next few years: to increase the use of marketing tools and reduce their operational cost. No company is exempt from this need, and it seems that the market will make it increasingly complex to achieve a clean and truly useful structure.

We believe that an operational cost reduction of at least 30% will allow marketing teams to rethink their annual budgets and find more and better investment possibilities. 2025 is the year of diagnosis, study and decision towards an optimisation strategy in the next months.