Your MarTech Stack Is Broken. Here Is How to Fix It.
Most marketers are sitting on technology they barely understand, half use, and definitely have not integrated properly.
Your marketing technology stack is probably working against you.
Not because the tools are bad. Not because you chose the wrong platform. But because somewhere between the optimistic onboarding call and the reality of Tuesday morning, things got messy.
Data went stale. Integrations broke. Someone built an entire customer knowledge base inside ChatGPT on their personal laptop. And now three departments are claiming attribution on the same sale while nobody can actually prove what drove it.
Welcome to the modern MarTech stack.
On this week’s episode of Canned; the Marketing Podcast, Ben van Rooy of Human Digital and Steph Quantrill of Cue Marketing explore one of the most talked about and least understood topics in our industry: what actually belongs in your marketing technology stack, how B2B and B2C stacks differ, and why AI is not the magic fix everyone wants it to be.
This episode is dense. It is practical. And it will probably make you want to audit every tool your team is paying for.
What Is a MarTech Stack
There is a distinction worth drawing early.
“Working in MarTech” means you are employed by a marketing technology company. Your MarTech stack is the collection of platforms, tools, and systems your organisation uses to attract, convert, engage, and retain customers. They are different things, and conflating them leads to confused conversations in boardrooms.
As Ben puts it: “When someone says, what is your MarTech stack, they mean, what are the technologies that you’re using to execute your marketing?”
Some businesses try to do everything inside one platform. Some startups will attempt to run their entire operation out of HubSpot, and fair enough, HubSpot does pack a lot into one place. But for most organisations, the stack is a constellation of tools that need to talk to each other.
That “talking to each other” part is where things tend to fall apart.
The episode walks through the core layers of the modern MarTech stack. What follows is a breakdown of each, with the B2B and B2C nuances that make this topic far more interesting than any vendor whitepaper will admit.
Customer and Audience Data
This is the foundation. The epicentre. If your business claims to be customer centric, this is where that claim either holds up or crumbles.
In B2B, the centre of gravity is your CRM. This is where your contacts, accounts, pipeline stages, and buying committees live. It supports everything from lead nurturing to account based marketing, and it gives sales and marketing a shared view of what is happening with a prospect. When it works, it is effective. When the data is incomplete or out of date, it is a liability.
In B2C, the picture is more fragmented.
If you are running ecommerce, you are in a strong position. You have first party data flowing in from your Shopify store, enriched by tools like Klaviyo, and supported by Google Analytics. You are close to your customer.
But if you are in FMCG and you are not selling direct, you may have almost no customer data at all.
As Steph points out: “If you’re working in FMCG, you likely will not have a CRM system at all.”
Your retail partners hold the data. The Woolworths and Coles of the world know what your customers are buying, which aisle they are walking down, and what other brands they are picking up. You are relying on Nielsen, IRI, and whatever insights you can piece together from social listening and media performance data.
B2B data is geared towards relationship management and deal progression. B2C data is focused on behaviour, transactions, and real time engagement. Both matter enormously. Neither is simple.
CRM and Lifecycle Marketing
This layer is about managing communication over time. It is the engine that keeps prospects and customers moving.
In B2B, this means marketing automation. Lead nurturing sequences. Scoring models that determine whether a prospect is cold, warm, or ready to buy. Email workflows that push people through a buying journey. The goal is alignment between marketing and sales, and the tool of choice is almost always the CRM with automation bolted on.
Steph offers a reality check from the trenches: “If the data that you’ve input right at the beginning of your CRM system is incorrect or half complete, then it just becomes so much harder to see where you are.”
The tool is only as good as what you put into it. The best CRMs now use AI to pull data from emails, phone calls, and other touchpoints automatically. But that only works if the foundation is solid.
In B2C, lifecycle platforms lean more towards engagement than lead management. Email, SMS, push notifications, retention journeys, discount vouchers, cross sell recommendations. The question is less “where is this prospect in the pipeline” and more “how do we get them to buy again, and soon.”
This is also where the subscription economy enters the conversation.
As Ben observes: “Everyone is trying to subscriptionise their service. It started with Netflix, and now all of the onlines are doing it. But now also all of your physical products are being subscriptionised.”
It is the dominant model for driving recurring revenue and lifetime value, and it is reshaping how B2C stacks are built.
An interesting geographic nuance emerged in the episode. Steph, who is currently working in the US market, notes that American consumers are deeply accustomed to subscription purchasing through Amazon and similar platforms, while New Zealand and Australian consumers are not quite there yet. The platforms and logistics infrastructure are not ready for it at the same scale. Something for any APAC marketer to keep in mind when benchmarking against US case studies.
Your Website and Digital Experience
Your website is one of your most important owned assets. Or at least, it should be.
“How many rooms have you sat in where the question has been asked, will we even need websites in the future?”
The answer, for now, is yes. Websites are here for at least the medium term. AI may eventually change how content is discovered and consumed, but you still need a place to put your story, your credibility, and your conversion points.
In B2B, the website is a research and credibility tool. Buyers come to check you out before they engage. Content hubs, landing pages, case studies, and clear conversion points matter across the full funnel.
Ben identifies credibility as the first pillar: “In B2B, it’s all about, can I as a buyer trust you with my business?”
That means consistent branding, real faces rather than faceless corporate anonymity, fast loading pages, and SEO optimised content that gets picked up by both traditional search and AI powered search.
For a deeper dive into how B2B brands can build effective digital experiences, Human Digital’s insights hub covers B2B marketing extensively.
In B2C, the website’s role depends on your business model.
If you are direct to consumer, your site is the point of transaction. Product discovery, user experience, merchandising, checkout flow, payment options, and shipping all matter because someone visiting your site is usually ready to buy.
If you are FMCG, your “website presence” may actually live on other people’s sites. Your investment goes into making sure your product is front and centre on the digital shelf of your retail partners.
Then there is the app question.
The episode offers a useful rule of thumb. If customers use your product or service daily or weekly, an app makes sense. If they interact with you every six months, do not build an app. Invest in a mobile optimised website instead. This is advice that could save a lot of businesses a lot of money, especially when you factor in ongoing maintenance, development resources, and the reality that consumers do not want another app on their home screen.
In the QSR space, Steph highlights an added complexity. Brands like McDonald’s and Hell Pizza need to manage their presence across their own app, their website, and third party aggregators like Uber Eats. Each channel has different UX requirements and different implications for your tech stack. Choosing where to invest requires understanding where your customers actually buy, not where you wish they would.
Content and Campaign Execution
Every stack needs a way to create, manage, and distribute content. This is where marketing gets made.
In B2B, content tends to be educational. White papers, webinars, case studies, long form articles, sales enablement assets. Campaigns involve multiple touchpoints across longer timeframes, and keeping everything consistent across sales and marketing teams requires solid asset management and brand governance.
In B2C, the tempo is faster. Product storytelling, seasonal campaigns, retention content, paid media assets, dynamic creative. Production volume is higher and turnaround is quicker.
As Steph frames it: “You’re spending less time in your storytelling phase and more in your product and retail. You’re literally trying to sell things and get it out the door faster.”
The difference is not just tone or format. It is cadence.
B2B content goes deeper and longer. B2C content moves faster and scales wider. Your stack needs to support whichever rhythm your business demands. And ideally, your digital asset management system should serve as a single centralised location for the latest logos, product photography, and brand assets. Version control is not glamorous, but it is essential.
Commerce, Conversion, and Revenue
This is where the stack supports commercial outcomes.
In B2B, conversion is tied to your pipeline. Opportunity tracking, proposal activity, account engagement, sales enablement, ABM platforms, intent data. Conversion is rarely a clean online transaction. It often turns into a contract, a legal review, a negotiation. But it still needs to be recorded back in your CRM.
As Ben notes: “Most good sales teams want to get that bonus, so they will record that sale.”
In B2C, ecommerce platforms play a much bigger role. Product catalogues, checkout systems, payment processing, shipping logistics. The transaction is the moment that matters, and everything in your stack should be optimised to reduce friction at that point.
Analytics, Attribution, and Optimisation
This is the data layer.
In B2B, measurement focuses on lead quality, pipeline contribution, influenced revenue, and account engagement. Attribution is complex because buying cycles are long, touchpoints are many, and multiple people within an account are involved.
In B2C, the metrics shift to acquisition cost, conversion rate, basket size, repeat purchase, retention, and lifetime value. For ecommerce, tools like Google Analytics provide good visibility. For brick and mortar retail, it includes foot traffic, dwell time, and in store conversion rates. Retargeting and abandoned cart recovery are standard plays.
Matching real time sales data with traffic data and media performance is harder than any dashboard makes it look. There are time lags, data quality issues, and platform discrepancies that mean your reporting is often more like a best available approximation than a definitive picture.
Integration and Orchestration
This is the glue. It is the layer that most businesses underinvest in.
No stack works if the systems are disconnected.
In B2B, integration typically centres on the CRM as the hub, with marketing automation, sales tools, and reporting platforms feeding into it.
In B2C, integration needs to connect ecommerce, customer data, media platforms, service channels, and retention systems.
The priority for both is a seamless experience. For the customer and for the internal teams trying to make sense of it all. Tools like Looker Studio or Power BI can pull disparate data sources into unified views, but the quality of those views depends entirely on the quality of the underlying data and the integrity of the integrations.
Who Actually Owns the MarTech Stack
Marketing needs the stack to do their jobs, but they rarely own it outright. Technology teams often manage the infrastructure. Finance controls the budget. In B2B organisations using HubSpot or similar platforms, customer success, sales, and marketing all have an equal stake because they are all touching the customer at different points.
Ben argues that there should always be one clear owner. In mature organisations, that is typically a marketing operations or revenue operations team. This team sits at the intersection of marketing, technology, and finance, and they ensure that the stack is not just functional but strategically aligned.
If you do not have this function, you are likely experiencing the symptoms. Duplicated tools, conflicting data, attribution arguments, and a general sense that nobody quite knows what is going on.
The AI Layer
AI is entering every layer of the stack. Predictive lead scoring in B2B. Churn prediction in B2C. Faster campaign analysis. Better personalisation. Pattern recognition that would take a human team weeks. The potential is real.
Every platform now has an AI overlay, and they are all expanding beyond their core function, trying to do everything. Steph’s advice is sharp: “Think about what’s the core function of this piece of technology. Do you need another piece of software for the other things? How are those two things going to speak to each other?”
And here is the line that should be on every marketer’s monitor.
AI does not fix poor strategy.
Messy data plus AI equals messy outputs at scale. Garbage in, garbage out.
There is also a genuine risk around employees using external AI tools to build knowledge bases and learning models outside the company’s sanctioned systems. This fragments the knowledge base, creates data security risks, and can breach compliance regulations. Larger organisations need a leadership led AI strategy, not a free for all.
What Should Marketers Do Now
Audit your stack against your business needs. Do not find a shiny tool and then look for a problem. Start with the problem.
Focus on the core layers first. Get your CRM and customer data foundation right before adding extras.
Improve data quality and integration before anything else. The stack will not save you if the data is broken.
Identify a small number of useful AI use cases. Do not try to automate everything at once.
Build systems your team can actually use. Invest in training. A tool nobody understands is a tool nobody uses.
Do not buy tools just because they have AI features. That is not a strategy.
Right size your tech for your business. If you have ambitious growth plans, make sure your tools can scale. If you are staying where you are, do not pay for enterprise solutions you will never need.
Think about ongoing costs. Seat licences, development resources, maintenance. A MarTech stack is not a one time purchase. It is an ongoing commitment.
The fundamentals of marketing technology have not changed, even with AI reshaping the landscape. Businesses still need to know their audience, create relevant experiences, drive conversion, and measure impact.
What is changing is the speed, intelligence, and adaptability of the tools available.
The future of MarTech is not B2B versus B2C. It is about understanding that the same core building blocks work across both when used properly. The winners will be the marketers who get the basics right, integrate thoughtfully, adopt AI where it genuinely adds value, and resist the temptation to bolt on every new feature that lands in their inbox.
Dust off your CRM. Untangle your integrations. Clean your data.
Then worry about the AI.
Watch the Episode
If you want the full conversation, watch the episode of Canned featuring Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill.
You can also subscribe to the Canned Marketing Substack for weekly insights into marketing strategy, brand building, and industry trends.
Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing)
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