MarTech solutions have exploded from roughly 150 tools in 2011 to over 15,000 available in 2025. This 100x expansion in just over a decade illustrates the extreme proliferation of marketing technology, contributing to unprecedented complexity for marketing teams.
For marketing leaders, technology overload is a very real challenge. CMOs now face an endless array of platforms and tools; over 15,000 solutions in the marketing technology space as of 2025.
Yet having “more tools” has not equated to better results.
In fact, it’s often the opposite: so much choice can become overwhelming, and vital capabilities get lost in the noise.
According to Gartner, 80% of CMOs feel overwhelmed by emerging tech and new channels, and over 75% admit they’re falling short of their business goals as a result. The surge in martech options has led to fragmented systems and siloed data, making it harder, not easier, to execute effective campaigns.
This complexity is evident in how little of our martech investments we actually use. Recent research found marketers utilize only about one-third of their martech stack’s capabilities, a figure that has declined from 58% in 2020 to just 33% in 2023.
In other words, even as companies spend more money (marketing technology now commands roughly 25% of marketing budgets), they struggle to realize value from that investment. “Not only is utilization low, but it’s declining year over year while people are buying more,” notes one marketing CEO, underscoring the paradox of martech stack bloat. Clearly, adding more tools to the pile has not solved the core issues of integration and impact.
Why More Tools Haven’t Solved the Problem
If technology alone were the answer, we’d have no problems, ever.
Instead, marketing stacks have become unwieldy. Teams juggle dozens of platforms that “don’t talk” to each other, with data living in silos, and manual work needed to bridge gaps. In theory, the big marketing clouds promised an all-in-one solution, but in practice, many all-in-one suites turned out to be rigid and slow-moving.
It’s telling that 72% of enterprise martech implementations fail to deliver proper ROI, often due to one-size-fits-all architectures that can’t keep up with the 18-month innovation cycles of modern marketing. Simply put, piling on another feature or platform won’t help if the underlying marketing infrastructure is fragmented and inflexible.
Part of the problem is organizational as well. With CMOs averaging short tenures and each new leader bringing in their preferred tools, stacks grow redundant and inconsistent. One may end up with multiple platforms all intended to do similar jobs, like sitting on a couch with three universal remotes, each controlling different things. Meanwhile, no one has complete visibility or ownership of the full stack, and users aren’t fully trained on each new tool.
The result is that marketing technology, instead of streamlining marketing, often slows it down. In fact, Gartner finds 80% of marketing leaders say their tech stack growth is outpacing their team’s ability to manage it. Little wonder that many marketing teams feel stuck – burdened with too many tools, yet lacking the agility and insight they were supposed to gain.
The Case for Composable Marketing
Is there a way out of this tech quagmire? Increasingly, top marketing organizations are shifting toward composable marketing as the answer.
This approach recognizes that marketers don’t need more tools. They need better ways to connect the tools they have.
Rather than relying on a single monolithic suite or a tangled web of siloed apps, composable marketing means building a stack of modular, interoperable components that can be easily added, replaced, or reconfigured as needs evolve.
The goal is to design your marketing ecosystem to be open, flexible, and aligned by design instead of closed and cobbled together. In Gartner’s view, a composable enterprise uses “swappable modules and packaged frameworks” so it can adapt to change at the pace of business, and marketing is perfectly positioned to benefit from this philosophy.
Crucially, composable marketing is far more than an IT trend or a buzzword; it’s a strategic rethinking of how marketing works. It begins by breaking down stacks into interchangeable building blocks (often following MACH principles – Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless), organizations enable a new level of agility.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, companies adopting a composable approach will outpace competitors by 80% in rolling out new features and updates.
In an environment where speed and adaptability are competitive advantages, that is a staggering edge. The key insight is that modularity drives speed: if you can integrate a new best-of-breed tool or adjust a workflow without overhauling your entire system, you respond to market changes much faster than a competitor locked into a rigid platform.
Equally important, a composable stack frees marketers from vendor lock-in and the limits of a single roadmap.
You’re no longer waiting on a suite provider’s yearly update to get a capability you need; you can plug in a specialized solution when required, or swap out a component that isn’t keeping up.
The result is technology that adapts as quickly as your strategy does. It’s a move away from chasing the latest shiny tools, toward building lasting marketing capabilities that can evolve continuously.
Benefits of a Composable Stack
What tangible benefits can marketing leaders expect from a composable marketing approach? Early adopters are already reporting profound improvements across agility, scalability, and performance:
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Accelerated innovation and speed-to-market: Organizations with composable tech can deploy new features and experiences much faster. Gartner forecasts an 80% faster implementation of new features for composable adopters within a few years. For example, the beauty retailer Sephora reorganized its digital commerce on a composable architecture and can now launch new localized customer experiences 4× faster than under its old monolithic system. In short, marketing teams can respond to opportunities in days or weeks instead of months.
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Greater scalability and resilience: Modular ecosystems handle growth and spikes in demand far more gracefully. IKEA’s switch from a rigid e-commerce platform to a composable model cut its feature deployment time from months to weeks, and even enabled the company to support a 300% increase in online sales during the pandemic without system failures. The ability to “swap in” capacity or specialized components on the fly means your stack can scale up (or down) as needed, without the wheels coming off. Marketers aren’t stuck waiting on an overburdened central system – they can expand capabilities in stride with business growth.
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Improved ROI and marketing performance: When your tools truly work in concert, you get more value from each. Instead of paying for bloated suites and only using 30% of the features, a composable stack lets you invest in precisely the functions you need – and ensure they’re fully utilized. This often translates to better marketing outcomes. For instance, Ulta Beauty saw a 40% improvement in campaign performance and significantly faster rollouts of new personalized offers after implementing a composable customer data and personalization approach.
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Freedom to innovate (without disruption): A composable ecosystem welcomes new tech rather than being threatened by it. You can experiment with a new AI-driven tool or a niche channel platform by plugging it into the stack, without overhauling everything else. If it delivers value, keep it; if not, unplug it. Companies moving in this direction report that technical architecture directly enables business agility. In other words, marketers gain the confidence to try bold ideas because the tech backbone can flex and absorb change. Long term, this is also a hedge against whatever comes next because your ecosystem can continuously evolve.
Entirely: An Open-Ecosystem Approach in Action
So what does composable marketing look like in practice?
The strongest example is Entirely, the new open martech ecosystem built expressly on these principles.
Entirely was founded as a collaboration between several specialist marketing technology companies – Facelift, Marmind, Censhare, and Elaine – each a leader in their domain. Together, they merged their strengths into an integrated, AI-driven ecosystem that gives marketers genuine control and agility.
Each founding partner contributes a critical piece of the marketing puzzle: : AI-powered automation and email, Facelift: Communication Orchestration, : strategic planning and performance, and : content and asset management.
Combining these capabilities under a unifying vision allows Entirely to provide a blueprint of a stack that is modular by design yet already aligned out-of-the-box.
What makes Entirely different from a traditional marketing platform is that it’s not a closed, all-in-one suite, but rather an open, flexible environment built for real-world needs. The architecture is deliberately designed to integrate with the tools you already use and preserve your existing MarTech investments, avoiding any vendor lock-in.
Recently, for example, Entirely integrated epoq, an AI-driven personalization engine, to further enhance its capabilities in onsite recommendations – and this addition “deepened what the ecosystem can deliver…demonstrating Entirely’s ability to absorb innovation without disruption”. In other words, the platform grew smarter and more powerful overnight, without any pain for users.
An ecosystem approach puts marketers back in control. Entirely’s philosophy is that the future of marketing isn’t monolithic – it’s modular, dynamic, and open by design.
As Entirely’s approach highlights, “marketing – how it works and how it will be done – is on the brink of a radical transformation”. The winners of tomorrow will be those who seize that transformation today.
In 2025 and beyond, market leaders won’t be defined by who has the biggest budget or the most tools, but by who can continuously adapt and evolve their customer experiences in real time.
Experience the Future at The Entirely Summit 2025
This year, Entirely Summit 2025 is bringing the concept of composable, AI-powered marketing to life for the marketing community. From October 29–30, 2025 in Lisbon, 500+ CMOs, marketing architects and leaders will convene at the summit to develop the future of modular marketing technology.
It’s a hands-on, immersive experience for decision-makers who are ready to rethink how marketing works.
Attendees can expect:
- Deep-dive workshops and labs,
- Expert keynotes on topics like AI in marketing, modular tech stacks, orchestration in real-world environments, and
- VIP networking opportunities to exchange ideas with peers and pioneers shaping the ecosystem.
It’s a three-day masterclass in making marketing faster, smarter, and more human – exactly what composable marketing is all about.
In addition to bringing the news of brilliant new tools, the goal is to spark a community-wide conversation about the future of marketing stacks, with input from the very people who are building and using them every day.
Registration is currently open for the summit, which takes place from Oct 29-30th, 2025, in beautiful Lisbon, Portugal!
Now is the time to secure your spot and join fellow marketing leaders at what promises to be a defining moment for the industry. Facelift and the Entirely team are extending an open welcome – come be part of this movement.
If you’re ready to move beyond the status quo and into a world of marketing technology that truly works for you, the Entirely Summit is the place to be. Register here and secure your place in shaping the future of marketing – we’ll see you in Lisbon!
