Modern marketing practices follow three essential anchor beliefs:
Digital First: Everything you do begins with digital presence. It does not matter how physical a marketing campaign is; it is wrapped in a digital envelope.
Instrument Everything: Build data capture in everything, measure capture, engagement, and conversion.
Audience First: The prospect/customer database is the heart of your marketing system, the CRM/MA system is the central nervous system. Respect your audience by crafting targetted content from their viewpoint; avoid condescending or speaking above them. Focus on them, not on yourself.
The concept of a MarTech stack is not new, and if you find yourself explaining to your CMO what it is and why you need it, well, it's probably time for a new CMO. The modern enterprise requires this stack of applications to drive efficiency, personalize customer interactions, and maximize ROI. It's not what you spend on the stack; it's what you get out of it that is meaningful.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Examples: Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Hubspot, Zoho, and roll-your-own with Monday, Airtable, and others.
Let's assume that a CRM is well-understood at this moment and does not require elaboration. It is on this list because it is the foundation upon which marketing tech stacks are built. In addition to serving as the master records for prospect and customer engagement, automating sales processes, and much more, this critical system is the primary interface between the marketing and sales operations teams.
The marketing and sales operations teams collaborate to tailor the CRM to meet both shared and individual goals. Although these systems can function with their default settings, customization unlocks their full potential and enhances performance.
A CRM achieves the fundamental goal of "the right lead to the right rep at the right time."
CRM system pricing is all over the board and depends entirely on the full suite of applications bundled into the contract. Expect to pay $150+ per user per month, plus an annual fee on the number of records you maintain. One-time payments for implementation can be as little as $5k to well over $1m for the most complex projects.
Marketing Automation (MA)
The goal of any marketing automation system is simple: to automate repetitive marketing activities such as email campaigns, lead nurturing, engagement insights, and analytics. There hasn't been much innovation in marketing automation, and merging CRM with marketing automation through acquisitions hasn't led to any breakthroughs. This, along with CRM, is a staple application for marketing teams. Without a marketing automation layer, scaling marketing to reach desired results is simply not feasible.
It is important to know that the combination of marketing automation and CRM enables the implementation of data processing rules that are necessary to comply with privacy compliance requirements. This underscores how the reach of these applications is not limited to the processing of sales leads.
Similar to CRM systems, marketing automation applications are licensed according to modules, users, and data. Enterprise-class systems in their most basic form are $1,500 per month for the essential functions and a basket of users.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Examples: Wordpress, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager
Simply put, the CMS is the website. Modern websites combine several layers of functionality, including authoring, publishing, hosting, content delivery, digital assets, and much more in integrated platforms. It is beyond the scope of this article to deep dive on website platforms.
One thing to know about websites is that the sophistication of your business and the reach of your brand will dictate the sophistication of the platform you select. The purpose of a website is to move unknown site visitors to known prospects, and serve essential corporate functions. Invest time in developing detailed requirements before you buy and evaluate each platform on not just the ability to meet the requirements but also the resources that are necessary to deliver on the requirements.
Pricing for CMS systems begins at $0.00 and runs into the millions. In addition to the core technology, it is essential to factor in hosting and support. For a moderate-to-high traffic website (150k+ site visitors per month) supporting a global enterprise, budget $250k annually for licensing, hosting, and 24/7 site monitoring and response.
Digital Asset Manager
Examples: Brandfolder, Bynder, Canto, Adobe Experience Manager, Cloudinary, MediaValet, IntelligenceBank, and Nuxeo
A digital asset manager (DAM) is often overlooked functionality, and very often it is bundled in the CMS tier. The purpose of a DAM is to catalog and serve images, videos, PDFs, and audio files. This may appear to be rudimentary functionality, but know that these applications bring a level of sophistication with them that enable SEO, accessability, and performance requirements.
This is critical functionality because SERP factors like alt text, dynamic sizing for performance, and mobile responsiveness are dependent on DAM functionality.
Pricing for digital asset managers is based on users and number of assets (size) stored. For enterprises you can expect to budget $1,500 per month for a capable and integrated platform.
Enterprise Search
Examples: Algolia, Elastic Enterprise Search, Coveo, Yext
This is a category of products that is already being disrupted by LLMs, but even with this evolution it is critical to know why search is a powerful actor in your stack.
Websites are complex dances in information architecture designed to drive people to the intended result in as few clicks as possible. When I build a website I set a goal of no more than 3 clicks from homepage to detail. Google is really your homepage and over 50% of your traffic will land on your site, homepage or detail page, from Google or a similar search engine.
That leaves a lot of traffic coming to your site direct or from email, and as your website increases in complexity the amount of content you have will overwhelm your nav structure. This is where enterprise search comes in... on average a well-designed website with a solid search service will see 7% of site visitors using the search function to find what they need. Some, maybe most, will be customer support content, while others will be finding a product or solution based on keywords known to the site visitor.
Website platforms have search services and, in my experience, most of them are not very good. Indexing, content prioritization, synonyms, personalization, redirects, and much more require the horsepower of a 3rd party search service. In many cases, these search services actually build entire sections of content, if your site is designed to take advantage of this capability.
Budget anywhere from $0.00 to $100,000 per year, based on the product and size of your index.
Data Enrichment
Examples: Zoominfo, LeadLander, Clearbit, Datanyze, InsideView
As the category name suggests, this is all about data. Marketing and sales teams run on data and the more/better data you have, the stronger you will perform.
At the most basic level, these tools take existing contact information you have in your CRM and enrich it with a full array of fields you are not asking for, such as LinkedIn profiles, mobile numbers, org charts, and much more. This enrichment process happens in realtime for contacts as they are created, and in bulk form against your CRM data. The bulk enrichment is particularly useful for updating contacts on job changes, emails, etc.
These tools are invaluable for prospecting activities by both marketing and sales teams. At my last company we were adding 60k prospects per year through Zoominfo. This was, by a wide margin, the single largest growth lever for our prospect database.
Additional services offered by these companies are used to facilitate form submissions (reduce the number of fields you are asking for, backfill at submission), smart search lists, and company and prospect insights that can be used to trigger playbooks.
Pricing is all over the map, and for the typical enterprise you should budget $25,000 on the low end to $300k annually for larger and more extensive implementations.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Examples: Segment, mParticle, Treasure Data
Personalization at scale requires the ability to collect, normalize, and unify customer data from multiple sources. It would be logical to think that this is a form of data transform and load, and no small part of the functionality is just that. A major difference is that data transformation tools typically load data in analytics and/or data warehouses. In the case of CDPs, the routing of data sends clean, structured data to analytics, customer engagement platforms, advertising, and many more engines that benefit from having structured customer engagement data.
A simple use case is tracking customer behavior across mobile, web, email, and social media channels, structuring the data and routing it to advertising (e.g. Facebook), email, and click analytics platforms for hyperpersonalized campaigns without needing custom integrations.
Data volume drives pricing in this category, and at the enterprise level API access and number of endpoints will impact pricing. Budget $1,000-$5,000 per month.
Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI)
If your marketing ideology is data-dependent you will need a service to store, transform and move data from varios source applications. The analytics part of the equation requires a different class of application.
Analytics tools take data and present to the business user information that can be used to understand what happened and to forecast what will happen. Dashboards are powerful applications in the marketing tech stack that simplify for people across the team that which is inherently complex and tangled.
Pricing across this layer of the stack is a function of data quantity, the complexity (time) of queries, and outbound data transfer volumes. For a mid-sized enterprise, $25k annually is a good target number, while large enterprises can quickly surpass $100k annually.
Translation Services
Examples: Lionbridge, Transperfect
Why is a service included in the technology stack, you ask? Simple, modern translation is a combination of translation method and a technology component that integrates with your website platform to pipeline new and updated content through translation and into your website.
Far too often the view on translation is a narrow focus on new content translation. I've even heard people say "why can't you just copy/paste from Google Translate or ChatGPT." You can, but I can guarantee you that the number of updates you make each month to existing content, site nav, site features, will far outweigh the new content you publish. It is with this view that the translation service is valued. Translation memory is a concept that, as the name suggests, remembers what has already been translated and skips those words when updates are made, thereby translating just the new words on any asset/page.
Translation is still, for the most part, a per-word pricing model, and machine translation has come a long way in capability even it if does not yet fully mimic human translation. The technology component I am referring to is the integration with your website to your translation service. This is a technology component, licensed annually.
Budget $18,000-$40,000 per year for this integration, with a one-time implementation expense.
Advertising & Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
Examples: Google Ads, Media Math, Meta, Google Search Console
Google completely transformed how advertising is priced and purchased with their Adwords auctions. A consequence of that development was that every major ad network shifted to granular engagement-level pricing formulas, and a tier of software solutions emerged for managing the ad-buying and budgeting process.
I can tell you from experience that if you are running a dozen Adwords campaigns, a handful of Facebook and Linkedin promotions that you can manage this manually. However, scaling up to hundreds of keywords campaigns and intertwined social media campaigns, retargeting, etc. will quickly spiral out of control. Not only will the process be unmanageable, it will be more costly because you will miss the small realtime movements in price that can be exploited to stretch your advertising dollars.
Combined with customer data platform feeds, advertsing can be highly specific while also driving a high ROI.
The budget is entirely dependent on how much money you allocate for advertising.
Social Media Management & Listening
Examples: Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Meltwater, and about a hundred other companies.
Social media management apps have three primary purposes. The first is managing the posting process across channels, optimizing for day and time of day. The posting function is split, the functional posting and the "what are you posting." Good social media management apps will steer the user to the optimal copy for posting.
On your published posts these same apps will develop performance data that can be routed to your analytics platform. Trend tracking and sentiment analysis are powerful compliments to post-level analytics data.
The final leg of the stool is monitoring that which is said of your own brand. You have an obligation to track mentions of your brand in social media, across all channels. In the case of customer engagement for support or sales, these same posts need to be routed to the appropriate group within the company. Crisis management demands a high level of scrutiny when monitoring, along with escalation capabilities.
The tools range from free with limitations to full-fledged enterprise solutions that run $1,000 per month, as a starting point.
Personalization & Experience Optimization
Examples: Optimizely, Dynamic Yield, Adobe Target
Personalization is an area that is undergoing radical transformation with AI capabilities. It is also a tip-of-the-iceberg layer in the stack that depends on data from other layers in the stack. My experience is primarily with Adobe Target, and with this tool it is possible to completely reorganize your web experience based on customer signals.
The more common functionality shared by applications in this category is A/B testing and personalized content recommendations. Both are good places to start in the personalization roadmap, but A/B testing brings constraints that need to be internalized by your team. The primary constraint is volume, which is to say you need a lot of traffic to generate a meaningful data set to work with. A second, equally important constraint is that you can test just one condition at a time for a valid test, which means you are locking down your website while running it.
A reasonable budget for these tools is $1,000 per month, while Adobe Target will run substantially more than that and require the full Adobe Experience Manager suite to function.
Customer Support & Chatbots
Examples: Drift, Zoominfo Chat, Intercom, Zendesk
This entire category is at a crossroads because of AI. The "old style" of chatbot requires you to build out playbooks for site visitor engagement. There is an art to these scripts, designed to accomplish three separate objectives in parallel.
Anticipate common requests and provide useful information without resorting to "let me get an agent for you".
Progressive profiling for the purpose of converting unknown site visitors to known contacts.
Connect with a sales or service representative during business hours, but only at the point the site visitor is ready to talk with someone.
These tools integrate with your CRM and push chat transcripts with the contact information. They can be highly valuable tools for sales and service team members but at the same time they increase the volume of information without necessarily increasing the meaningful signal. The value is there, but the overhead for managing them is also present.
I wrote at the top that this category is at a crossroads. AI-based systems that train the LLM on your custom dataset (website, help library, etc.) is fundamentally altering the script playbook model for chatbots. It is true that even with a AI chat style interface that the backend data integration needs to happen. This is one layer in the stack that is destined for significant evolution in the year ahead.
Chatbot services run $2,000-$5,000 per month for enterprise-class services.
Affiliate & Influencer Marketing Management
Examples: Impact, PartnerStack, Refersion
For consumer brands these tools are used to manage partnerships and influencer collaborations. I will preface my comments by saying I do not have much experience in this area - consumer - of marketing, but I believe it will be of increasing importance in B2B marketing. The reason is that B2B and B2C are converging based on how buyers in B2B act, which is to say that even when representing a business they revert to self-interested buying habits.
Similar to advertising and demand side platforms, these tools focus on campaign management, spend management, and performance analytics.
Budget as little as $500 per month to several thousand per month.
Email Marketing Platforms
Examples: Sendgrid, Klaviyo, Amazon SES, Postmark
But wait! Don't marketing automation tools enable bulk email sending. Yes, and in many cases you may not need any product in this category. The term "bulk email" covers a lot of ground, if you answer yes to these questions you probably need one of these products:
✅ High Email Volume – If you’re sending 100K+ emails/month
✅ Transactional Emails – campaigns and workflows
✅ Dedicated IPs & Deliverability Control is required
For small and mid-sized enterprises, the email functionality built into marketing automation platforms is adequate. You will still need to configure security settings on your sending domain, and dedicate email addresses for outbound to build credibility with spam filters, but it is doable.
If you are a high-volume sender and deliverability is crucial to your business, you need one of these alongside your marketing automation platform. The good news is that, in most cases, sending a high volume of email through one of these products is going to be more cost effective than sending through the email sender attached to your marketing automation platform.
Data Privacy and Compliance
Examples: Osano, OneTrust, Google Tag Manager
In today's world marketing is privacy compliance. The old days of putting an opt-in checkbox on your contact form and calling it done are gone. GDPR and CCPA have real teeth and everyone from government bureaucrats looking to make a name and personal injury law firms looking to make a buck are using them.
Privacy compliance platforms are integral in your marketing stack, and integrate with your CRM. The focus is not solely unsubbing someone when they click the link, it is ensuring that you follow no contact guidelines through all channels, adhere to cookie consent permissionss, data subject requests, and can trace each contact record back to a submission with opt-in, or a DPA that underpins your contracts with vendors on this list.
The cost for these services depends entirely on the range of services you buy from them. They start at $200 per month and can run into 6 figues per year when you subscribe to assessment services.
Total Estimated Cost of a Full Enterprise Marketing Stack
A fully integrated enterprise-level MarTech stack budget depends entirely on the scale, number of users, and customization requirements. When you are building your budget and plan, prioritize investments according to how they enable future investments in your capabilities, and always take into account implementation expenses and time required to complete each project. With this foundation, you can then plan your team expansion and program budget to leverage the technology and drive ROI.
Final Thoughts
Yes, this is a lot. Modern enterprise marketing technology is essential for driving efficiency, automation, and personalization in today’s competitive landscape. While costs can vary, the right combination of tools tailored to business needs can yield significant ROI by improving lead generation, conversion rates, and customer retention.
Investing in the right stack is not just a matter of budget but of strategic alignment with business objectives. Looking at the cost of this buildout without also forecasting the payout is the single mistake I see marketing leaders make. It's not enough to just buy a lot of tools and turn them on, it is also essential to rethink how your organization functions with these tools, the efficiencies you create, and most importantly the hard dollar returns you create.
In my prior role I allocated $7m per fiscal year for technology and generated $250m+ per year in sales opportunities with a team far leaner than I had in some startups.
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