Composable MarTech Meets Cloud: Redefining Agile and Scalable Customer Experiences

By Anutosh Yadav, SVP Technology at Material

Marketing technology — also known as martech — has evolved to offer businesses numerous tools to enhance customer experiences and streamline marketing efforts. In fact, on average an enterprise uses more than 120 martech tools, and according to Gartner’s latest CMO Spend Survey, nearly 24% of marketing budgets in 2024 were allocated to martech.

Yet Gartner also found that companies failed to use 42% of their martech capabilities. Only a fraction of companies have fully integrated solutions that provide unified customer journeys. These findings highlight the limitations of traditional martech architectures and underscore the urgent need for more agile, scalable and integrated solutions.

This environment has led to the growing popularity of composable martech: assembling a flexible marketing technology stack by selecting individual, best-in-class components that can be seamlessly integrated. This modern, modular approach allows businesses to build tailored solutions that align with their unique marketing strategies and evolving customer needs.

Overcoming Inefficient Ecosystems

The monolithic setup of traditional martech architecture often results in inefficient, inflexible and more costly ecosystems that make it difficult for organizations to meet ever-changing market needs. Such pre-built, all-in-one solutions provide only limited flexibility and interoperability. Their lack of agility hampers organizations’ ability to integrate new tools, adopt emerging technologies or pivot to new strategies in real time.

The drawbacks are even more severe for organizations that are expanding inorganically, via mergers and acquisitions. They face the challenge of having to merge the tools from multiple organizations into a consolidated martech ecosystem. Too often these companies end up with siloed systems, unable to connect customer data and marketing workflows efficiently, leading to a fragmented customer experience and missed business opportunities.

The increasing complexity of customer data further compounds this fragmentation. Companies are struggling to unify customer data across platforms, which hinders marketers’ ability to create actionable insights. As a result, brands are unable to deliver unified, personalized omnichannel experiences across disparate touchpoints, leading to disconnected customer journeys, loss of brand loyalty and, ultimately, declining revenue.

Adopting composable martech and building a stack consisting only of the best tools that meet the organization’s needs can resolve these issues. And when combined with cloud technologies, composable martech becomes even more powerful. Cloud infrastructure enables these modular martech components to be rapidly deployed, scaled and managed. The integration of composable martech with cloud platforms enables organizations to shift away from rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions toward a more dynamic, adaptive system. The cloud provides the necessary scalability and agility, enabling marketers to quickly add new functionalities, automate processes and manage vast amounts of data without the constraints of traditional IT infrastructure.

In essence, “composable martech meets cloud” is about creating an ecosystem where businesses can innovate faster, scale more efficiently and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences by leveraging both modular marketing tools and cloud capabilities.

Five Key Benefits of Composable Martech in the Cloud

The convergence of composable martech and cloud technologies offers several significant benefits that directly address the issues faced by businesses relying on traditional marketing architectures.

1. Agility and Flexibility. A primary advantage of a composable martech stack is its ability to adapt rapidly to changes in the market or customer behavior. In a traditional setup, integrating new tools or updating existing systems can take months due to complex dependencies. With a composable approach, businesses can select and integrate individual components — whether it’s a new customer data platform (CDP), an email automation tool or a social media management solution — without disrupting the entire stack. The cloud facilitates this agility by enabling quick deployment and easy scaling of resources based on demand.

2. Enhanced Personalization. A composable stack powered by the cloud allows businesses to create personalized customer experiences at scale by leveraging the best tools for specific tasks. For example, adding a specialized AI-driven personalization engine that integrates seamlessly with a cloud-based CDP can enable brands to deliver highly targeted content to customers in real time. This modularity ensures businesses can offer tailored experiences across all channels, helping to build stronger customer relationships.

3. Cost Efficiency. Building a composable martech stack in the cloud reduces the need for significant up-front investments in infrastructure and technology. Organizations can pay for the specific tools and resources they need and scale them as required, optimizing costs in the long run. Cloud-based platforms also allow companies to automate routine tasks, reducing the need for manual intervention and freeing up resources for more strategic initiatives.

4. Improved Data Unification and Insights. Cloud technology provides the backbone for real-time data collection, processing and analysis, which is critical in today’s data-driven marketing world. A composable martech architecture enables companies to unify their customer data from various sources — for example, CRM, website analytics or social media — into a single platform. This unified view of the customer journey, facilitated by the cloud, leads to deeper insights and more-informed decision-making, which in turn enhances the customer experience.

5. Futureproofing and Innovation. By adopting a composable martech approach in the cloud, companies can ensure their marketing technology stacks remain futureproof. They can easily integrate new technologies without overhauling the entire system, enabling experimentation with emerging martech trends such as AI-driven marketing, voice search optimization and blockchain for data security. This future-ready architecture encourages innovation and keeps brands competitive in a fast-evolving market.

Weighing the Options

Even as the marketing technology landscape becomes increasingly complex, it is still failing in many ways to meet the shifting needs of the modern business landscape. In particular, the monolithic nature of traditional martech makes agility a challenge. By leveraging the modular tools of composable martech and scalable cloud platforms, organizations can achieve the agility, personalization and cost efficiency needed to deliver seamless and scalable customer experiences.

Opting for the best-of-breed composable martech option is not for every organization, of course. For one thing, transitioning from a best-of-suite stack requires a certain amount of planning and change management. As businesses continue to evolve, however, composable martech meets cloud represents the future of customer-centric marketing, enabling brands to stay competitive and drive long-term growth, so there is merit to carefully weighing this option.

Our team of experts at Material can help you determine which martech solutions will help your organization profitably grow, now and in the future.