There is a quiet crisis happening inside marketing budgets across the country, and it does not show up on any campaign report.
Businesses are buying marketing technology they are not using. And the scale of the waste is significant.
According to the CMO Survey, only 56.4% of purchased martech tools are actually being used. [1] That means nearly half of every dollar spent on marketing software is generating no return whatsoever. The tools are licensed, the invoices are paid, and the dashboards sit largely untouched.
Gartner’s research adds another layer to this picture. Their utilization metric — measuring the share of available martech capabilities actually being used — sat at 33% in 2023 and has only climbed to around 49% in 2025, even as CMOs set targets closer to 61%. [2] The gap between what businesses are paying for and what they are actually using remains wide.
At the same time, the share of marketing budget going to martech is declining. Gartner’s CMO Spend data shows the mean percentage of marketing budget allocated to martech has dropped significantly from its peak earlier this decade. [3] That decline is not because businesses have found better ways to spend the money. It is because the ROI on martech investment has been disappointing enough that CMOs are pulling back.
These data points together tell a story that should concern any marketing leader. Businesses are spending less on technology because the technology they have already bought has not delivered. And the technology has not delivered largely because it was never properly implemented, integrated, or adopted.
Here is how it typically unfolds. A business purchases a marketing automation platform, a CRM, a social media management tool, an SEO platform, and a content management system. Each purchase is justified by a specific use case and a projected ROI. But the implementation gets rushed, the training gets skipped, the integrations between tools never get fully built out, and the team defaults back to the manual processes they already know.
Six months later, the tools are technically active but functionally unused. The licenses renew automatically. The waste compounds.
The CMO Survey identifies this pattern consistently. Marketing technology underperformance is rarely a technology problem. It is an adoption problem, an integration problem, and a change management problem. The tools work. The organizations just have not built the processes and the capability to use them effectively. [1]
What is the solution? For some businesses, it is consolidation — reducing the number of tools to a smaller, better-integrated stack that the team can actually master. For others, it is better onboarding and ongoing training investment. For many, the most practical answer is outsourcing execution to a partner who already has the stack, already has the expertise, and can deliver the outcomes without requiring the client to build internal capability from scratch.
This is one of the strongest arguments for agency partnerships right now. When your internal team is stretched thin and your martech stack is underutilized, adding more tools is not the answer. Partnering with an organization that has already solved the utilization problem — and can apply that infrastructure on your behalf — is often faster, cheaper, and more effective than trying to build it yourself.
The tools are not the problem. The gap between buying and using is the problem. And closing that gap is where the real marketing ROI lives.
Conversion Media Group has the infrastructure, the expertise, and the track record to deliver results without requiring you to build a martech stack from scratch. If you are tired of paying for tools that are not working, call us at 1-800-419-3201.
[1] CMO Survey, “Marketers Spend on New Technologies While Battling Usage and Impact Challenges”
[2] MarTech, “How Marketers Can Help Boost Martech Utilization”
[3] Marketing Dive, “AI Remains a Top Priority for CMOs but Spending Lags”