How to build an unbeatable marketing tech stack in 2025

Key highlights:

• A connected marketing stack streamlines marketing operations, accelerates content production, and enhances distribution
• Unbeatable MarTech stacks enhance productivity and collaboration through integrations, automation, and AI tools
• Digital asset management (DAM) platforms are the foundational technology of a robust marketing stack

Are you wondering which tools will add the most value to your marketing tech stack? Are you curious about what it takes to build an unbeatable marketing stack?

As marketing teams look for ways to deliver better results with similar annual budgets to 2024, leaders must be smart about where to invest their limited resources. According to Forrester, “only 35% of B2B marketers expect investments to increase by 5% or more.”

Tighter belts mean leaner appetites around tech spending.

The solution: Maximize the impact of marketing technology spending by focusing on platforms that make content lifecycle management efficient, thereby speeding up content to every market and increasing content value.

Below, you’ll find out the top tools to build your marketing tech stack and why a digital asset management platform needs to be at the top of your list.

What is a marketing stack?

A marketing stack, or MarTech stack, is a collection of marketing tools that streamline digital marketing operations using integrations and improve marketing team efficiency with automation and AI.

Marketing solutions work together to generate better business outcomes by eliminating tedious manual processes using built-in integrations or application programming interfaces (APIs). These automated touch points create bridges between tools for data to flow freely in your tech stack.

Best-in-class marketing stacks also automate workflows and task management, aligning stakeholders, marketers, and content creators. Many marketing tools include AI features that speed up project planning and collaboration, content creation, AI-powered search and retrieval, and content distribution.

Marketing stacks improve marketing processes such as:

• Sales enablement
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Lead generation
• Launching products
• E-commerce automation
• Email marketing
• Data analysis
• Social media marketing

Streamlining your tech stack makes your team more productive across the board, amplifies your marketing and sales pipelines, and improves overall business results.

How to pick the right marketing stack tools

Getting the right business technology to power your operations isn’t something you should piece together lightly. After all, this technology needs to drive actual growth toward revenue goals, not just improve productivity.

Here are a few tips as you research new tools to include in your marketing stack. Any new platform needs to:

1. Align with your marketing strategy

The best tools are the ones that effectively execute business strategy.

The tools you choose shouldn’t necessarily follow the next trend or be the favorite solution of new executives coming in the door. Every tool needs to meet the biggest challenges of your business head-on.

For example, while one marketing automation platform may be an industry standard, an emerging solution in automation may have precisely the features and capabilities your sales and demand generation teams need to compete in the market — at a lower price point, with faster adoption, and integrated with your current stack.

2. Hit pain points head-on

Ensure that the tools you select meet the current pain points that teams are experiencing. Talk with managers and contributors in different departments to find out where the headaches are (and which platforms are causing them).

Once you have a list of challenges, identify common themes and tools and see which tools can solve both while fostering business growth.

Remember to think about the future growth of your organization and the features you may need when selecting new tools, too.

3. Integrate with your existing stack

An integrated marketing stack amplifies workflows for all your teams.

Check integration compatibility between the tools you’re researching and your existing marketing tech stack. It’s best practice to implement a new solution that integrates with your current marketing tools.

4. Include AI features

Purchase new tools that have AI features to meet your marketing goals faster. Your team needs to produce more marketing campaigns, market more products, and produce more pipeline next year, all of which take more on-brand content. Power up teams to produce marketing collateral at scale by investing in future-focused tools that include AI features.

AI-powered tools can improve project planning and collaboration, accelerate content workflows, and skyrocket productivity. For a better ROI, invest in mature AI tools.

The unbeatable marketing stack lineup

Get the conclusive list to build the best marketing stack, from work management and digital asset management solutions to marketing automation, social management, and the latest AI tools.

Here are the platforms you should have in your stack.

Digital asset management solution

Digital asset management (DAM) platforms, like Canto, provide a single platform to organize, find, collaborate, and distribute all your organization’s digital assets. The benefits of digital asset management platforms are numerous, including centralized asset management, optimized asset discovery, and better asset utilization.

DAM software also includes tools for brand and licensed asset control — like digital rights management, version control, approval statuses, expiration dates, and style guides — to enforce brand consistency across teams and channels.

Modern DAM software offers AI tools — like AI-powered search, AI face recognition, auto-tagging, and auto-captioning — that accelerate content management, video marketing, and distribution.

DAM platforms also integrate with your work management, content management system, marketing automation, and social media management solutions, to name a few. Using integrations and DAM workflows, you can streamline your content workflows and create a connected marketing ecosystem.

Key takeaway: DAM platforms centralize and organize digital content, manage and control brand and licensed assets, include robust AI search features, and connect your marketing stack into one ecosystem.

Work management solution

Work management tools, such as monday.com, Wrike, and Adobe WorkFront, ensure your projects and tasks are managed efficiently and completed on time, within scope, and on budget.

You also need to ensure project files are accessible by stakeholders across your stack using integrations. If you do, automated processes will speed up creative workflows, which could accelerate essential projects.

Key takeaway: Work management helps with project planning, tracking, and task management. Ensure you integrate your DAM content library and work management platforms so everyone works with the latest files.

Search engine optimization (SEO) solution

Search engine optimization is the science (maybe the art?) of creating and managing content that users and search engines love. You may be handling SEO services in-house using SEO software, or you could be working with an SEO agency that handles site auditing, on-page and off-page optimization recommendations, and new SEO content for you.

Teams using SEO tools that produce massive amounts of SEO-rich content may also consider using AI content planning tools that combine planning, competitor and keyword research, and copywriting into one platform for a streamlined workflow.

Regardless, SEO must be part of your tool stack if you are going to take market share from competitors, own specific keywords in your industry, generate more leads, and increase organic traffic to your site.

Key takeaway: SEO solutions help create content that search engines and users love. SEO should be part of any content-driven marketing stack to increase your website’s domain authority, traffic, and leads. You can use SEO software, SEO agencies, or all-in-one content planning tools.

Productivity solutions

All teams need a place to accomplish the actual task work, which is where productivity staples such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams can help. Teams can gather quickly to brainstorm and then move into collaborative task work.

The real collaborative magic happens when work management and productivity solutions are connected to your DAM library, aligning teams around the correct files and speeding up production.

Key takeaway: Every marketing stack needs productivity software to get work done. Ensure your productivity tools integrate with your work management and DAM platform to ensure teams collaborate on the correct files.

Asset creation solutions

Your creative team needs design software where they can create brand assets such as animations, custom graphics, and videos. That’s where free design tools like Canva and premium solutions such as Figma or Adobe apps such as Lightroom Classic, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro are useful.

For growing brands, connecting your DAM platform to your asset creation solutions is incredibly important. Your DAM platform helps ensure your designers, marketers, and stakeholders always work with the latest design files. Equally important, DAM software allows your approved designs to be searchable and accessible to the right teams.

Key takeaway: You need design software in your marketing stack to maintain a professional look across channels. Integrating your asset creation solutions with your DAM platform helps create a unified brand presence.

Generative AI solutions

Keeping up with marketing campaign content demands is tough. Let AI help.

Text-to-image AI tools can assist with co-creating original art quickly, make art concepting faster, create variations of art, and provide more creativity for teams needing an out-of-the-box approach in their next campaign.

For copy teams, consider the latest AI content writing tools to combine the power of AI with content templates, brand voice synthesis, and AI-generated copywriting to get content to market faster.

Key takeaway: Generative AI art tools can help with concepting and variation while adding a flair of creativity. AI content tools can help copywriters research, outline, and draft many different content types.

Content management system (CMS) solution

Content management system (CMS) tools such as WordPress and Drupal make creating and managing web content extremely easy. CMS tools populate essential web pages such as product pages, landing pages, blogs, and more.

There are both open-source and proprietary software versions of CMS to choose from.

To create an automated website content delivery workflow, ensure your CMS and DAM tools integrate and use DAM and CDN (content delivery network) capabilities.

Key takeaway: CMS platforms make managing web content, media, and web pages easy. Connect your CMS and DAM platforms to streamline workflows and ensure your web content is on-brand.

Product information management (PIM) solution

PIM systems centralize, organize, and distribute product information across teams and channels. PIM platforms are essential for e-commerce retailers, manufacturers, and CPG brands that manage large product lines and variations across multiple storefronts.

With PIM software, accurate product attributes will be displayed in the correct formats on your storefronts, giving prospects and customers a consistent omnichannel product experience.

For organizations that want to maintain brand consistency, pairing a DAM and PIM platform is the best option. DAM and PIM platforms work together to align digital assets and product data, improving brand and product perception in the marketplace.

Key takeaway: Organizations with many products need a PIM platform to centralize and organize product information. Pairing a DAM and PIM platform unifies product content and information for a consistent omnichannel product experience.

Analytics solution

Analytics platforms play a huge role in helping marketing leaders with direction on overall marketing strategy. Analytics helps decision makers understand which marketing activities and web pages are the most impactful, identify marketing efforts that aren’t working, and alert teams to trends in website visitors and overall traffic.

At a minimum, make sure your CMS and DAM platforms integrate with Google Analytics, a powerful and widely known website analytics platform. It’s best if your SEO tools and social media asset management solutions also integrate.

Key takeaway: Make data-driven marketing decisions with web, CMS, DAM, and social media analytics at your disposal.

Marketing automation solution

If your organization is going to scale outbound email marketing campaigns to prospects and customers effectively, you must automate processes for your team with marketing automation tools.

Tools such as Mailchimp allow teams to easily pair customer or lead contact lists with personalized and scheduled emails to increase conversions and push products.

Use Zapier to further integrate your tech stack with automation for even better workflows. Popular zaps can automate just about any manual task, including document distribution.

Key takeaway: Marketing automation helps streamline repetitive processes such as outbound emailing or document distribution.

Social management solution

Brands must be present and engaged on social media to build followers and brand loyalty. However, with the growing number of social platforms and social media assets required to engage visitors, organizations need help maintaining consistent on-brand publishing and engagement cadences.

Marketing tech stack tools such as Hootsuite enable users to write social copy using AI, schedule posts across social media platforms at the best times and days, check post engagement using Hootsuite analytics, and collaborate across teams easily. Detailed social analytics can also up your game on social media strategy.

Remember to integrate your social media management and DAM platforms to ensure that every social post uses approved, on-brand content.

Key takeaway: With integrated social media management and DAM platforms, you can efficiently manage your social calendar, write copy, check analytics, and distribute on-brand content across social platforms.

Why digital asset management is the foundation of your marketing tech stack

Unbeatable marketing stacks aren’t made by chance — they consist of carefully-chosen tools that streamline marketing operations. And consider that powerful brands are built over time using unique, hand-crafted, and on-brand content across channels. There’s only one platform with the content production, brand management, and integration capabilities to handle that: digital asset management software.

Digital asset management platforms are a hub for your technology ecosystem, streamlining all marketing efforts that require digital assets to power them.

If you don’t already have a digital asset management system, you probably rely on a basic cloud storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox to manage your brand’s digital assets.

Consider the following:

• Are all your teams able to find and access the correct files when they need them?
• Are you going to market on brand across every channel?
• Do you have control over sensitive branded, licensed, or copyrighted assets?
• Do you know what content is in use?

Digital asset management solutions are more sophisticated and better suited than cloud storage to organize, find, and distribute digital and brand assets. That means on-brand files are ready for every team member when needed, leading to better campaign results, more customers, and a more powerful brand.

The best marketing tech stacks include Canto

Canto’s industry-leading digital asset management platform makes organizing, finding, collaborating, and distributing digital assets a breeze. Canto streamlines digital asset management for many of today’s top brands, including Sony, Domino’s, and LinkedIn.

Canto offers solutions like AI Visual Search to instantly find and access the most relevant media in your library. Canto also offers Media Delivery Cloud to automate media publication to sites, stores, and platforms in the perfect sizes and ratios.

Canto integrates with the tools you are already using today, increasing tool adoption and decreasing time to value for your DAM library purchase.

Ready to transform your marketing stack? Book a personalized demo to see Canto’s DAM platform in action today.