Martech’s share of the marketing budget has fallen to a five-year low of 19.4 percent, yet 62 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase marketing technology investment this year. Both statements hold because spending is being concentrated in fewer platforms that do more. Utilization is the number that explains the urgency: teams reportedly use about 33 percent of the capability they have purchased.
The pressure from finance. After 20 to 50 percent annual martech spending growth between 2020 and 2023, 2026 shows flat to 5 percent increases. CFOs are reportedly asking for 3 to 5 times return on subscriptions, and 41 percent of firms have cut tools as a result. The average enterprise still uses more than 100 marketing tools daily.
The market itself has stopped growing. The total number of martech products rose from 15,384 to 15,505 this year, an increase of 0.7 percent. After years of rapid expansion, that is close to flat. Narrow single-purpose tools are reportedly disappearing 20 to 30 percent faster than integrated suites, so buyers who pick niche tools carry more vendor risk.
Why fewer vendors is not enough. A common failure is to consolidate contracts without touching the workflows that wasted the old tools. A team using a third of its capability across ten products can move to three products and land at the same utilization with a smaller bill. Fixing the workflows is the harder part, and it is the part that determines whether utilization rises.
A utilization audit as the starting point. For each platform, list the features the team actually uses weekly, the features it paid for but never configured, and the person who owns each. Cancel or downgrade where nobody owns a feature. Keep platforms where usage is deep and connected to data in other systems. That gives finance a defensible answer when asked about return, and it gives the marketing team a stack it can operate.
Sources referenced in reporting: Knecht Strategies, Marketing Technology Stack Consolidation in 2026, TechnologyChecker, Marketing Technology Statistics Q3 2026, Improvado, Marketing Technology Trends 2026, Rohit Prabhakar, 10 Marketing Technology Trends for CMOs in 2026.