The average org now juggles 75 different martech tools. And two in every three marketers use 16+ apps just to get through their day.
If you thought tool sprawl itself was a problem for marketers, wait till you hear this: the real catch is that these tools don’t talk to each other.
Recent Gartner research shows that only about 49% of tools in a typical marketing tech stack are actively used. That means half the stack is adding cost and complexity without pulling its weight.
So, what’s the solution?
It’s so intuitive yet so hard to implement: tool consolidation.
That’s why, in this post, we’ll break down the process of consolidating the marketing tech stack. We’ll share how pairing your stack with AI that actually understands your work helps teams move faster, stay aligned, and finally get real value from AI.
- What Is Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation?
- Why Marketing Teams Are Drowning in Tools and What It Leads to
- Benefits of a Consolidated Marketing Tech Stack
- Why Connected AI Beats Disconnected Point Solutions
- How to Consolidate the Marketing Tech Stack Step by Step
- What Happens When Marketing Teams Consolidate Their Tech Stack
- Consolidating the Marketing Tech Stack with ClickUp
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation?
Marketing tech stack consolidation is the process of replacing scattered, single-purpose marketing apps with a unified platform. This brings your core marketing functions—like project management, content creation, campaign tracking, and team collaboration—into one connected environment.
Consolidation creates a single source of truth for all your marketing work.
This doesn’t mean settling for a clunky, all-in-one tool that does everything poorly. It means choosing a modern, converged workspace where specialized capabilities are built on a shared foundation, giving your team and your AI the full context they need to succeed.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Marketing Teams Are Drowning in Tools and What It Leads to
Most stacks have grown organically—one tool for planning, another for content, another for approvals, another for reporting. On paper, it looks powerful. In practice, it’s exhausting. Because when your context lives everywhere, you end up losing momentum.
Data silos fragment your customer view
When your customer data is scattered across a dozen different platforms—your CRM, email tool, analytics software, and social media apps—you never get the complete picture of your user experience map. This forces your team to make critical marketing decisions based on partial information, turning personalization into a guessing game.
Trying to calculate campaign attribution becomes a nightmare of exporting spreadsheets and manually stitching data together, leaving you with an outdated and incomplete view of what’s actually working.
Generic AI creates off-brand “workslop”
Using generic AI tools trained on the public internet is like asking a stranger to write your marketing copy. They don’t know your brand voice, your product’s unique positioning, or what messaging has resonated with your audience in the past.
The result is “workslop”—AI-generated content that technically fills the page but lacks the specific personality and insight that makes marketing effective. Your team ends up spending just as much time editing this generic output as they would have writing it from scratch, defeating the purpose of using AI in the first place.
The only fix is an AI that’s connected to your actual workspace—your briefs, brand guidelines, and winning campaigns.
🔑 Key Takeaway: Connected AI produces on-brand content because it has context; disconnected AI produces filler because that’s all it knows.
📮ClickUp Insight: 62% of our respondents rely on conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Their familiar chatbot interface and versatile abilities—to generate content, analyze data, and more—could be why they’re so popular across diverse roles and industries.
However, if a user has to switch to another tab to ask the AI a question every time, the associated toggle tax and context-switching costs add up over time.
Not with ClickUp Brain, though. It lives right in your Workspace, knows what you’re working on, can understand plain text prompts, and gives you answers that are highly relevant to your tasks! Experience 2x improvement in productivity with ClickUp!
Context switching kills creative momentum
👀 Did You Know? 68% of employees say they lack enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.
Every time a marketer has to jump from their project plan to a separate document app to find the brief, then to a chat tool for feedback, they lose focus. This constant context switching creates a heavy cognitive load, draining mental energy that should be spent on creative work.
Hidden costs compound across disconnected subscriptions
The pain of a fragmented tech stack goes far beyond the obvious subscription fees. Disconnected tools create a web of hidden costs that drain your budget and productivity. These include:
- Duplicate data entry: Manually inputting the same information into multiple systems
- Manual syncing: Wasting hours trying to keep data aligned across platforms, usually with messy spreadsheets
- Integration maintenance: Paying for developers to fix broken APIs and webhooks
- Training time: Onboarding team members to numerous different platforms, each with its own learning curve
🔑 Key Takeaway: These costs rarely appear as a single line item on a budget report, making them easy to ignore. But when you add them all up, the total cost of ownership for a fragmented stack is often shockingly high. Companies waste an average of $21 million per year on unused SaaS licenses alone.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of a Consolidated Marketing Tech Stack
When your tools and teams operate with shared context in a unified workspace, those pain points flip into powerful advantages.
Brand consistency across every touchpoint
Off-brand colors and outdated messaging that harm brand recognition slip into campaigns when guidelines live in a forgotten PDF. A consolidated stack keeps brand standards close to the work itself. So, teams reference the right voice, visuals, and messaging while they’re creating—not after.
💡 Pro Tip: Enforce visual and tonal consistency for every new campaign, blog post, or social graphic with ClickUp Templates. Ensure every piece of content is on-brand before it goes live using built-in ClickUp Proofing and approval workflows. Your team, partners, and clients can review and comment directly on the work in full context (not in a confusing email thread).
AI that actually knows your business
Generic AI tools are a dead end. They can’t produce great marketing content because they have no context about your business. Connected AI can instantly search your entire workspace, reference past campaigns, and understand your unique brand voice.
Connected AI that understands your business is possible with ClickUp Brain and AI Super Agents. These are not bolt-on integrations; they are native AI features that use your specific workspace context.
🌟 Use them to:
- Draft creative briefs based on what worked last quarter
- Get social media copy that perfectly matches your brand’s tone, and
- Surface insights from across all your campaigns (as Brain and Agents can access your tasks, documents, and conversations in your ClickUp workspace)
Faster campaign execution from brief to launch
Endless handoffs and coordination overhead slow down campaign execution and delay launches.
Consolidation removes those gaps:
- Briefs flow directly into tasks
- Feedback stays attached to the work
- Status updates are visible without chasing people down
💡 Pro Tip: Build a seamless brief-to-execution pipeline with ClickUp Automations.
📌 For example, you can set an Automation to automatically create a full task structure with assignees and due dates the moment a creative brief in a ClickUp Doc is approved. To take your automation even further, try the Email Automation with ClickUp Template to streamline repetitive campaign tasks.
Clear ROI visibility across channels
Connecting your team’s hard work to actual business results is nearly impossible when data is scattered.
Teams spend hours pulling data, reconciling numbers, and explaining gaps. A consolidated stack ties execution and outcomes together, so leaders can see what’s tanking and what’s driving results, without waiting for manual reports.
💡 Pro Tip: See real-time campaign performance right alongside the tasks and workflows that produced it by building custom ClickUp Dashboards. This gives your team and leadership a clear, immediate understanding of which channels, content types, and strategies are delivering the highest return on marketing investment.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Connected AI Beats Disconnected Point Solutions
The difference between a standalone AI writing tool and an AI embedded in your workspace is simple: context. A disconnected AI tool only knows what you paste into the prompt box. Every time you use it, you start from zero, manually feeding it the information it needs to do its job.
A connected AI, on the other hand, has persistent context. It’s like the difference between hiring a new freelancer for every project versus having a seasoned team member who has been in every meeting. The freelancer might be skilled, but they’ll take time to develop the deep business knowledge to produce truly strategic work.
🎥 To better understand the landscape of AI marketing tools and how they can fit into your overall strategy, watch this overview of available options and their capabilities.
Full workspace intelligence is what a connected AI like ClickUp Brain provides.
It learns from your projects, your team’s collaboration patterns, your brand assets, and your historical performance data. This is what allows it to move beyond generic “workslop” and produce content that is genuinely insightful and ready to publish.
| Capability | Disconnected point solutions | Connected AI workspace |
|---|---|---|
| Brand voice consistency | Manual prompt engineering every time | Learns from your existing content |
| Cross-campaign insights | Manual data export and analysis | Surfaces patterns automatically from campiagn data stored in your workspace |
| Brief-to-content pipeline | Multiple tool handoffs | Automated within a single workspace |
| Context retention | Surfaces patterns automatically from campaign data stored in your workspace | Builds on accumulated knowledge |
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Consolidate the Marketing Tech Stack Step by Step
Tech stack consolidation isn’t a weekend project, but it doesn’t have to be a painful, multi-year initiative either. Prioritize quick wins with this step-by-step approach:
Step 1: Audit your current tools and identify overlap
First, you need to know what you’re working with. Document every single tool your marketing team uses—including the “shadow IT” apps that people adopted without official approval.
For each tool, note:
- Its main function
- Who uses it
- What it costs, and
- Whether it’s truly essential
✅ Create a simple matrix with your tools on one axis and your core marketing functions (e.g., project management, content creation, analytics, collaboration) on the other. This will immediately highlight where you have redundant tools doing the same job, revealing the clearest opportunities for consolidation.
Step 2: Map your core marketing workflows
Before you can fix a broken process, you have to see it clearly. Use process mapping to visualize your team’s most important workflows, like campaign planning, content creation, and performance reviews. For each workflow, identify every step, every handoff between people or tools, and every point where delays or friction occur. This process analysis reveals the true cost of fragmentation.
✅ Use ClickUp Whiteboards to visually map every stage of a campaign, from intake to launch. You can depict handoffs, approvals, and tool switches using various shapes, sticky notes, and text fonts. Embed tasks, link Docs, and tag owners directly on the board, turning a simple diagram into a live, interactive system.
This makes friction impossible to ignore. If a workflow jumps between three tools before content is approved, you’ll see it immediately and know exactly where consolidation creates leverage.
Step 3: Define your non-negotiable capabilities
Consolidation doesn’t mean getting rid of every specialized tool. The goal is to have fewer tools that are better integrated. Make a list of the capabilities your team absolutely cannot function without.
Be brutally honest and specific.
📌 For example, “needing to schedule social posts” is different from “needing native Instagram carousel scheduling with automated first-comment replies.”
Separating the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves” will help you evaluate new platforms effectively and decide which specialized tools are worth keeping.
Step 4: Evaluate platforms for native AI and integration depth
If AI is part of your strategy, this step is non-negotiable.
When you’re ready to evaluate new platforms, prioritize two key areas: native AI and integration depth.
- Native AI: This means the AI is built directly into the platform, not bolted on as a third-party add-on. A native AI can access all of your workspace data, understand your workflows, and learn from your team’s work over time
- Integration depth: For the specialized tools you decide to keep, you need a central platform with robust, pre-built integrations. This ensures that data continues to flow seamlessly back to your single source of truth instead of creating Work Sprawl
That’s why many teams now prioritize converged workspaces with embedded AI—so agents can assist with planning, drafting, summarizing, and reporting using real context. This is also why turnkey solutions like ClickUp Accelerator focus on AI that’s activated within day-to-day work, not layered on top of it.
🧠 Fun Fact: ClickUp has replaced 3 or more tools for ~41% of our users!
And, here are some other benefits of consolidating your tech stack with ClickUp:
Consolidating the marketing tech stack with ClickUp Accelerator for Marketing Teams
With the ClickUp Accelerator for Marketing Teams, you start in a pre-built (but customizable) converged workspace where planning, execution, collaboration, reporting, and AI already work together.
Here’s how it makes you more productive from day one:
- Department-specific AI Super Agents (ready on launch)
ClickUp Accelerator includes 10+ prebuilt marketing agents such as:- Creative Brief Builder Agent: Turns intake requests into structured, on-brand briefs
- Social Post Generator Agent: Drafts and refines social copy with brand context
- Brand Checker Agent: Checks tone, messaging, and alignment against guidelines
- ClickUp Brain (contextual AI)
AI works directly inside the workspace, referencing existing Docs, tasks, past campaigns, and timelines—so output is relevant, not generic - Connected Enterprise AI Search
Instantly find tasks, docs, comments, dashboards, and attachments across the workspace—reducing time spent searching for old assets or decisions - Automated workflows and approvals
Use ClickUp Automations to trigger task creation, route content for review, notify stakeholders, and update statuses automatically - Dashboards for real-time visibility
Track campaign progress, workloads, and blockers in real time, so leaders don’t need weekly status decks to understand what’s happening - ClickUp AI Notetaker
Turn meetings into summaries, decisions, and assigned tasks automatically
Why this matters
Accelerator helps marketing teams go live in days, not months. It reduces tool sprawl first, then activates AI inside the work. This makes it easier for teams to trust the output and for leaders to see results fast.
Step 5: Migrate data and train your team in phases
Don’t try to boil the ocean. A phased migration is the key to a successful transition. Start with one workflow or one team, prove the value, and then expand from there. A typical phased rollout might look like this:
- Phase 1: Move project management and team collaboration
- Phase 2: Consolidate content workflows, including briefs, drafts, and approvals
- Phase 3: Connect analytics and build performance dashboards
- Phase 4: Fully activate and train the team on AI capabilities
Step 6: Measure results and optimize continuously
Before you begin, define what success looks like. Key metrics might include:
- Time from brief to launch
- The number of tools in active use
- Team satisfaction scores, and
- Actual campaign performance
Track these metrics throughout the consolidation process to demonstrate the impact of your efforts.
Consolidation is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing process of optimization.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Happens When Marketing Teams Consolidate Their Tech Stack
A campaign manager starts their day by opening one unified workspace instead of ten different tabs.
They see every active campaign, every pending approval, and every piece of content in progress on a single dashboard. ✨
They ask the context-aware workspace AI to draft social copy for an upcoming launch. The AI already has the campaign brief, understands the brand voice, and knows what messaging performed well on similar launches in the past. The copy it generates is 90% of the way there, not 10%.
This happens when your tools share context instead of fragmenting it.
Your team shifts from being reactive—chasing updates and manually compiling reports—to being proactive, with insights surfaced automatically and workflows that run themselves.
🌟 Case in Point: Cartoon Network’s social media team consolidated planning, collaboration, and execution into ClickUp, replacing scattered tools with one shared workspace. As a result, they were able to manage 2× more social channels with the same team size and launch campaigns months ahead of schedule—a clear signal of improved efficiency and coordination.
Summarize this article for me pleaseConsolidating the Marketing Tech Stack with ClickUp
ClickUp is the world’s first ClickUp Converged AI Workspace—a single, secure platform where projects, documents, conversations, and analytics live together with contextual AI embedded as the intelligence layer. It’s designed to bring your project management, documents, collaboration, and AI into one platform. For marketing teams, this eliminates the fragmentation that kills productivity and creativity.
Replace a handful of disconnected tools with a single, connected hub in ClickUp. Run your campaigns from start to finish with dedicated features for campaign management, ClickUp content calendars, and approval workflows. And for the few specialized tools you need to keep, all your work and data stay connected to your central source of truth through deep ClickUp integrations.
Eliminate martech sprawl and give your AI the context it needs. Try ClickUp for free!
Summarize this article for me pleaseFrequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What’s the difference between tech stack consolidation and just cutting tools?
Cutting tools is simple subtraction, while tech stack consolidation is strategic replacement. Consolidation goes hand-in-hand with choosing a unified platform that can handle multiple functions with shared context. It’s not limited to eliminating software and forcing your team to do more with less.
How long does marketing tech stack consolidation take for mid-sized teams?
Most mid-sized marketing teams can complete an initial consolidation in one to three months. A phased approach is key, starting with project management, then moving to content workflows, and finally activating analytics and AI.
How does AI-powered consolidation differ from traditional platform consolidation?
Traditional consolidation focused on reducing the number of tools. AI-powered consolidation prioritizes creating a unified context that makes your AI tools dramatically more useful, allowing the platform to become smarter as your team uses it.
Can one platform really replace specialized marketing tools without losing functionality?
The goal isn’t to replace every single specialized tool. It’s about reducing fragmentation where possible and ensuring deep integration for the essential, specialized tools that you keep.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
