The best marketing tools are the small number of tools that your team will actually open every week. Marketing teams use only 49 percent of their stack’s capability on average, according to Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey. That means that about half of what businesses already pay for goes unused. For a small to midsized business, the lesson’s to choose fewer tools, set them up correctly, and use them consistently rather than buy more tools or choose ones with the most features.
The commercial marketing technology (martech) landscape has grown to over 15,000 tools as of 2025, more than 100 times larger than it was in 2011. Most lists comparing marketing tools respond to that complexity by adding to it, recommending 20 to 30 tools organized by category, written for a marketing department with a dedicated operations person to manage integrations.
Our guide takes a different approach, identifying the five tool categories that matter for almost every small to midsized business, naming a specific, accessible option in each category, and telling you honestly when you’re ready to add a sixth tool and when you’re not.
Key Takeaways
- Gartner’s 2025 survey found that marketing teams use only 49% of their martech stack’s capability, an improvement from a low of 33% in 2023, but still far below full utilization.
- Underutilization’s a complexity and governance problem, not a tool problem. Adding more tools to a stack that’s already underused compounds the issue.
- 5 tool categories cover what almost every small to midsized business needs website analytics, email marketing, CRM or simple contact system, a social media scheduler, and a project or content calendar.
- Right number of tools depends on team size; a 5-person business and a 50-person business have very different thresholds for when a new tool’s worth the setup time.
- Adding a tool should follow a clear process, not a free trial; confirm that an actual gap exists, confirm someone will own it, and confirm it before adding it to the stack.
Why Most Marketing Tool Advice Makes the Problem Worse
The martech industry has an obvious incentive to recommend more tools. Most “best marketing tools” lists are written by, or in partnership with, companies selling marketing software, and the lists reflect that. A 20-tool roundup looks comprehensive, but comprehensiveness isn’t what a five-to-twenty-person business business needs.
Gartner’s research shows utilization dropping for several consecutive years before a partial recovery in 2025, from 58 percent in 2020 to a low of 33 percent in 2023, then back up to 49 percent. Even at the improved 2025 figure, businesses are paying for about twice as much marketing software capability as they actually use. The primary causes, according to Gartner, are stack complexity, lack of clear ownership, and weak data integration between tools rather than a shortage of features.
The practical finding for a small to midsized business is that every tool added to a stack needs an owner, a clear job to do, and consistent use; otherwise, it becomes just one more subscription that drains budget without producing value.
Five Categories that Cover Almost Every Business
Each category below answers one specific question that your business needs answered. Pick one tool per category before considering anything beyond these five.
1. Website Analytics: Is Anyone Finding Us and What Happens When They Do?
Recommended starting point: Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which is free, answers the most fundamental marketing question a business has, and most of what a small to midsized business needs from it resides in five core reports.
If your team’s never opened Google Analytics or finds the interface confusing, know that that confusion’s common. It’s not a sign that you need a more expensive tool. (See our guide on how to read Google Analytics for the specific reports that matter.)
For midsized businesses: If you run paid campaigns across more than two channels, GA4’s attribution data becomes harder to interpret on its own, and a dedicated attribution layer may be worth the cost. Most businesses under that threshold don’t need it yet.
2. Email Marketing: Are We staying in Front of People Who Already Know Us?
Recommended starting point: Mailchimp or a comparable email marketing platform with a free or low-cost tier. Email consistently returns the highest return on investment (ROI) of any digital marketing channel, and the barrier to entry’s low.
If you’ve an email list, but no consistent content plan, the tool isn’t the bottleneck. See our guide to email newsletter ideas for a structured way to keep sending out without running out of things to say.
For midsized businesses: Once your list segmentation needs go beyond basic tags such as triggering different sequences based on multiple behavioral conditions, a platform with more advanced automation logic becomes worth the higher price.
3. Customer Relationship Tracking: Do We Know Who Our Leads and Customers Are?
Recommended starting point: A free-tier customer relationship management (CRM) tool such as HubSpot’s free CRM or, for very small teams, a well-organized spreadsheet with consistent fields. The goal’s to have one place where every lead and customer lives, not a specific brand of software.
A CRM only earns its place in the martech stack once your team’s regularly losing track of who to follow up with. If that hasn’t happened yet, a spreadsheet’s a legitimate tool to use.
For midsized businesses: When more than two people need to see and update customer records simultaneously, a spreadsheet becomes a liability rather than a convenience, and a true CRM with permissions and activity logging becomes worth the setup investment.
4. Social Media Scheduling: Are We Posting Consistently without It Taking a Whole Day?
Recommended starting point: Buffer or Later, both of which offer accessible free or low-cost tiers covering the core platforms that most small to midsized businesses use.
Scheduling tools solve a consistency problem, not a content problem. If your team’s unsure what to post, see our guide on the best time to post on social media, which also covers how to build your own testing process once timing data isn’t enough.
For midsized businesses: Once you’re managing five or more social profiles with different posting schedules and approval workflows, a platform with team collaboration features and approval chains becomes worth the added cost.
5. Content and Project Planning: Do We Know What’s Being Published and When?
Recommended starting point: shared calendar, Trello board, or spreadsheet that tracks what content’s planned, in progress, and published across your blog, email, and social channels.
This is the category that most businesses skip, but it’s often the highest-leverage one as it’s what keeps the other four tools coordinated instead of operating in isolation. A blog post, a newsletter, and a social caption built from the same underlying idea produce more value together than the same three pieces of content created separately.
For midsized businesses: Once multiple people are creating content across departments, a dedicated marketing project management tool with task assignment and approval stages becomes worth the cost. A single marketer or a two-person team rarely needs more than a shared calendar.
When You Need a Sixth Martech Tool
Most businesses add a new marketing tool because a salesperson presented them with a compelling pitch, a competitor seemed to be using something more advanced, or a free trial was easy to start. However, none of those are good reasons. Before adding anything beyond the five categories above, confirm that the following three conditions apply.
- Specific, recurring gap exists—This needs to be a task that your team’s doing manually and repeatedly right now so that a tool would speed up or improve. It shouldn’t be for a hypothetical future need.
- Someone will own it—A tool with no clear owner becomes the one nobody checks. If you can’t name the person responsible for using a tool weekly, it’s not ready to be added.
- It connects to what you already have—A tool that creates a new, disconnected pocket of data adds complexity without adding insight. Confirm that it integrates with your existing analytics, email, or CRM before purchasing.
This is the same discipline that Gartner recommends for larger organizations conducting a martech audit: document what you have, confirm who depends on it, and compare the cost to actual use before adding anything new. The scale’s different for a small business, but the discipline’s identical.
Realistic Martech Stacks by Business Size
The five categories above apply to nearly every business, but how many tools within each category and how much you should pay for them depends heavily on team size. The table below offers a realistic starting point for three common situations.
| BUSINESS SIZE | REALISTIC TOOL COUNT | WHAT CHANGES |
|---|---|---|
| Solo owner or 2-5 people | 4-5 tools | Free or low-cost tiers throughout, spreadsheets often substitute for a dedicated CRM, 1 person owns entire stack |
| 6-20 people | 5-8 tools | A true CRM becomes worth adopting; social scheduling needs collaboration features; ownership of each tool should be assigned explicitly, not assumed |
| 20-50 people, multiple locations | 8-12 tools | Attribution and reporting tools become worth the investment; integration between tools matters more as manual data reconciliation no longer scales |
Even the largest tier here stays well under the 20 to 29 tools that the average enterprise marketing team reports using. A small to midsized business needs a martech stack built for its actual size from the start; it doesn’t need an enterprise stack scaled down.
Reference Sources:
- chiefmartec: Martech utilization problems: how to diagnose and remedy them
- Gartner: Maximize ROI With Marketing Technology (Martech)
- MarTech: Marketers are only using one third of their stack’s capability
- StackAdapt: What is a martech stack? A brief guide on how to build one (the right way)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the Best Marketing Tools
Here are the questions that come up most often when a business starts evaluating its tool choices.
What’s martech, and is it different from regular marketing software?
Martech, short for marketing technology, refers to the software used to plan, execute, and measure marketing activity including email platforms, analytics tools, CRMs, and social media schedulers. It’s the collective term for marketing-related tools considered together as a system, often called a martech stack; it’s not a different type of software from what most businesses already use.
How many marketing tools does a small business actually need?
Most small businesses with fewer than 5 employees need 4-5 core tools: website analytics, email marketing, a way to track customers and leads, a social media scheduler, and a simple content calendar. Business should only add tools beyond that if they’ve a specific, recurring problem that the current stack can’t solve rather than the desire to keep up with what larger competitors use.
Why do businesses end up paying for marketing tools they don’t use?
The leading causes are stack complexity, lack of clear tool ownership, and weak integration between systems, according to Gartner’s research, not a shortage of features in the tools themselves. If a business ads a tool without a clear owner or specific job to do will probably underutilize it.
Is a free CRM good enough or does a business need to pay for one?
A free-tier CRM’s sufficient for most small businesses, especially those with a single person managing customer relationships. Paid CRM features become worth the cost once multiple team members need simultaneous access, if lead volume becomes too high to track manually, or once automated follow-up sequences based on customer behavior become necessary.
Should a small business use the same marketing tools as a larger competitor?
Not necessarily. Enterprise marketing tools are built to manage complexity that most small and midsized businesses don’t have such as coordinating dozens of campaigns across multiple departments. Choosing a tool because a larger competitor uses it often means paying for capability that will go unused, which is the same underutilization problem Gartner has documented at the enterprise level, with the additional issue that it can’t absorb the wasted cost as easily.
Want Help Building a Stack That Actually Fits Your Business?
We help businesses across northern California and the rest of the U.S. to connect the right marketing tools to a clear strategy rather than adding software without a plan. See our marketing strategy services for how we approach this.
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