The 3 essentials of a future-proof martech stack

Your quarterly marketing targets have been set. A brainstorming session with your team yields an idea for a spot-on campaign. Together with your ops team, a customer segment is assembled. You select channels based on your industry know-how. Your creative team creates. You pull the trigger… and hope for the best. 

If this workflow sounds familiar, it should also sound out of date. The powerful combination of enterprise data warehouses and artificial intelligence has transformed marketing into a data-first discipline. 

The most successful marketers now begin with data, using it to determine the size, shape, and scope of each campaign. And the most successful marketing strategies use AI to build audiences and orchestrate customer journeys with granular personalization, sometimes down to the level of individual prospects.

Why a future-proof martech stack matters

If a data-first, AI-driven marketing strategy sounds optimal, it may also feel out of reach. While most marketing executives know that AI is key to hitting KPIs and spurring faster growth, some remain unsure of how to integrate AI into their existing tech stack, or whether they should rethink their tech stack altogether. 

The stakes have never been higher. Putting off decisions about new technology means failing to hit topline targets and falling behind AI-savvy competitors. And the technology choices are overwhelming: customer data platforms, all-in-one marketing suites, composable CDPs, and in-house solutions (not to mention the channel distribution tools)  — a jigsaw puzzle that seems to have too many pieces.  

Making the right choices yields accelerated growth. Making the wrong ones can be costly and result in expensive, time-intensive migrations to platforms that don’t perform as promised while locking you into a specific vendor or a limited set of channels. And they can leave you with mountains of technical debt and a disparate set of tools that don’t speak the same language and hobble your agility.

The three essentials of a future-proof tech stack

1. Centralized data in the enterprise cloud

AI is a foundational part of a future-proof tech stack — and something all your competitors have access to. That’s why your data is your differentiator: The first-party data you’ve collected gives you the 360-degree view of your customers and prospects as well as the detailed information on past campaign performance you — and your AI-driven tools — will need to execute accurately targeted, personalized campaigns.

Therefore, a high-performing AI strategy begins with a solid data strategy. And underlying any future-proof data strategy is a cloud-based data warehouse that unifies all your customer data. 

An enterprise data warehouse reduces cost and complexity by eliminating the pipelines connecting existing martech platforms that silo duplicate data sets. A centralized data warehouse also puts you in complete control of that data, becoming the accurate, single source of truth that AI needs to supercharge your marketing efforts. 

‍Traditional standalone customer data platforms do just the opposite. Because they require constant data imports and exports from the other platforms in your martech stack, they leave you vulnerable to security risks and proliferate data silos with incomplete, conflicting, or out-of-date data. 

2. A composable marketing toolset

The only constant is change: Technology evolves quickly, and your martech stack must be able to keep pace. A composable toolset that includes a composable orchestration tool (such as a  composable CDP or Compound Marketing Engine) enables you to integrate new, best-of-breed tools from whichever vendor you choose — and deprecate old ones easily, without triggering a huge migration project for each one. 

That means you can stick with the email platform, ad channels, and SMS marketing tools you have today, giving you the flexibility to execute campaigns on the channels that work best for your product and your audience. 

A composable architecture goes hand in hand with a centralized data cloud: By drawing directly from the data cloud, the composable platform eliminates redundancies, reduces security risks, simplifies data management, and lowers data storage costs. In some ways, this means the data warehouse functions like a CDP — it eliminates the need for a traditional CDP and instead, allows marketers to activate customer data directly from their cloud-based data warehouse.

3. AI for a broad set of use cases

AI-powered marketing has already moved beyond the aspirational. It’s a non-negotiable expectation that marketing teams will leverage AI to achieve topline targets, deliver compounding growth, and set their organizations up for future success. 

Nonetheless, AI is not a replacement for marketers — though it is changing the way that we work. Large language models (LLMs) like Gemini and ChatGPT have likely found their way onto your team’s desktops, making everyone familiar with many of the capabilities of generative AI. Team members may even be using it to produce copy or images to scale content creation.  

But generative AI is no substitute for a creative team: It’s a way to reshuffle a massive deck of content that may or may not result in unique, useful, or even on-brand creative. And it’s only the beginning of how AI can add value to your marketing efforts. Even if you’re creating content faster, if it’s still taking months to launch a single campaign and months more to optimize and relaunch it, you may be trying to scale the wrong thing.

How the future-proof martech stack uses AI

The future-proof martech stack goes beyond using AI for one-off use cases; it integrates AI holistically across all operations. The real value of AI in your marketing operations will surface when you use AI agents to leverage your customer data.

Agentic AI can automate audience segmentation and personalized journey orchestration, optimize campaigns in real time, and predict what channels will perform the best, simultaneously reducing campaign lag and improving the precision of your targeting. Your success as a marketer will soon hinge on your understanding of how to astutely leverage data, and AI is making it easier to do so. 

Composable, cloud-native is the best architecture for AI

The cloud-native composable architecture also extends to your AI toolset. With your data centralized in a cloud-based warehouse, you can adopt the LLMs best suited to your market and goals. That means you’re not locked in to the AI supplied by a traditional CDP or monolithic marketing suite.

But for AI to function optimally, it needs more than data: It will perform well only if the people who use and oversee it understand how it works and how to make it work for them. A successful AI strategy includes use case-specific skills-building for the team members who work with it.

Considerations for your next RFP

If you started from scratch today, would you build the martech stack you currently have? Very few marketers can — or should — answer “yes.” That means going technology shopping. An RFP process that includes input from cross-functional stakeholders is critical for building a future-proof martech stack. 

AI-powered martech is transforming how business is done; it has the potential to help you reach your goals sooner and simplify how you work. So rather than trying to discern everything the technology might accomplish, start with what you need it to accomplish. Construct your RFP around your company’s business goals and use cases — segmentation, orchestration, attribution, accelerating campaign cycles, increasing conversions, and so on. 

Similarly, start with your data and workflow needs rather than platform categories. Your tooling should support the data you collect and the way you prefer to work with it. Considering factors like data privacy and security, time to value, cost, and vendor support. And make composability a priority.

The future is here. Is your tech stack ready?

The center of gravity for your future-proof tech stack is a cloud-based enterprise data warehouse: an intelligent marketing hub that eliminates tools like traditional CDPs and the need to copy data from system to system. 

Rather than a behemoth, all-in-one marketing suite, a future-proof tech stack comprises lightweight, purpose-built composable tools that keep you nimble, give you the freedom to choose the most up-to-date technologies, and afford you the flexibility to run campaigns where and when you want to. 

And it includes an AI-enabled activation layer that enables you to harness the data in your warehouse for campaigns across all of those channels and optimize in real time based on evidence-based analytics on how those campaigns are performing.

The teams that leverage data cloud-native, composable martech will be best positioned to grow alongside AI, regardless of what the future brings. Will your tech stack be ready?

Book a demo and talk to our team about how the GrowthLoop Compound Marketing Engine can power your future-proof martech stack.