CFOs oversee every dollar spent, yet 56% of martech tools go used. How do you ensure your investments drive measurable financial results?
Your decisions shape the bottom line, so you need to check that those decisions are sound before making them. Cost-benefit analyses can help you make sure the benefits of martech spending decisions outweigh the future costs.
How martech can impact your business’s bottom line
Marketing technology has the potential to be a profit engine. When you build your martech stack with a robust marketing intelligence platform, you gain visibility into marketing spend and financial data, ensuring every dollar contributes to revenue and EBITDA growth. With advanced analytics and automation, you can cut waste, optimize budget allocation and make smarter, faster decisions that directly impact the bottom line.
Let’s dive into how marketing intelligence technology can impact your business’s finances:
Strong collaboration with your CMO
By aligning financial and marketing metrics, you can ensure the projected costs of your martech investments contribute to EBITDA growth and strategic cost management.
Keeps your marketing team on the leading edge
Every marketing team has access to the same ad platforms and data, but without the right marketing intelligence solution, they cannot extract meaningful insights to inform their decision-making process.
For a CFO this means inefficient marketing spend and missed revenue opportunities. A marketing intelligence solution enables smarter decision-making by turning raw data into actionable insights, ensuring your marketing budget delivers measurable ROI rather than wasted ad spend.
Transforms data into direct bottom-line impact
The right marketing intelligence solution doesn’t just help marketers; it gives CFOs greater visibility into marketing’s financial systems and data. Instead of relying on marketing teams to interpret complex data manually, automation provides real-time insights into which campaigns are driving revenue and which are draining resources. This allows for immediate budget optimizations, reducing wasted ad spend and increasing profitability.
Ensure every technology investment delivers measurable ROI
With companies allocating anywhere from 2% to 50% of revenue to technology, you need full visibility into which tools drive profitability. Research by Gartner shows that 30 to 40% of tech spending goes to shadow IT — tools acquired outside of IT approval. Marketing often turns to these unvetted solutions to fill perceived gaps in their stack, which can lead to inefficiencies, duplicate costs and security risks.
As CFO you need to know whether these tools contribute to revenue growth or simply add unnecessary costs. Your marketing intelligence can show you which channels and strategies are more effective and, therefore, worth boosting with new or more effective martech tools.
Eliminate waste from underutilized or redundant technology
Investing in martech that goes unused or doesn’t integrate with existing systems is a direct hit to profitability. Whether a tool lacks adoption, doesn’t align with business needs or has a more cost-effective alternative, unchecked tech spending erodes margins. A strategic approach ensures you’re funding solutions that align with both financial and operational goals so every dollar spent translates into measurable business impact.
What this means for you as Chief Financial Officer:
- Invest in the right tech, and you can empower marketing to drive serious growth.
- Improving revenue uplift with informed campaign decisions. Measuring the long-term effects of advertising is challenging, but marketing intelligence solutions that embrace measurement techniques like MMM and triangulation can provide you with recommendations to measure and strategically improve brand equity over the longer term.
- Investing in tools you think marketing needs can just add more wasted expenses to your P&L.
Key considerations for performing a martech cost-benefit analysis
When it comes to evaluating your existing martech investment or looking for other alternatives, projected costs are just one factor in an informed decision-making process. You should also consider:
Measuring ROI
Your job is to make sure the numbers add up. Understanding both the costs and benefits will help you assess whether a tool is worth the price tag:
Direct costs:
Every martech investment comes with upfront and ongoing expenses:
- Licensing fees: Whether it’s a one-time purchase or a subscription, software costs can add up fast.
- Implementation: Integrating new tools into existing systems takes time and often requires external support.
- Training and onboarding: Your teams need time and sometimes consultants to get up to speed.
- Maintenance and support: Updates, troubleshooting and vendor support keep things running smoothly but come at a price.
Indirect costs:
Beyond the price tag, there are hidden costs to consider:
- Time investment: Learning a new system takes employees away from other priorities.
- Disruptions: New tech means a transition period where productivity might dip.
- Security & compliance: More data means more responsibility to keep it protected.
- Integration costs: Making your new tools work with your existing financial reporting tools can add indirect costs if there is no native integration.
Direct benefits:
The right martech investment should deliver tangible returns:
- Marketing efficiency: Automation and analytics make campaigns smarter and budgets more effective and efficient.
- Better targeting, higher conversions: Martech helps marketers reach the right audience at the right time, increasing ROI.
- Less manual work: Automation cuts busy work so teams can focus on strategy not spreadsheets, which allows you to allocate resources to other needs.
Indirect benefits
Beyond the balance sheet, martech delivers long-term business advantages:
- Better collaboration: When finance, marketing and IT share real-time data, decisions get made faster and smarter.
- Stronger customer relationships: Personalized marketing builds loyalty and keeps customers coming back, which is critical as marketing shifts from performance-focused campaigns to longer-term brand building.
What this means for you as CFO:
Accurately estimating ROI should keep your financial decisions grounded:
- Project revenue impact: Will martech drive measurable growth or efficiency gains?
- Model different outcomes: Assess best-case, worst-case and most likely financial scenarios. Then, weigh the best options against each other.
Budget allocation strategies
Companies are currently spending 19.9% of marketing budgets on martech. This is expected to grow to 23.5% in one year and to 30.9% in five years.
So, how do you allocate this budget share correctly? How much in new emerging tools? How much more to sink into older tools that might be outdated or not the right fit?
The key is to start small. Take a data-informed approach to determine which of your tools are outdated and underutilized (and why).
Determine how much can be reallocated to new solutions that better suit the marketing team’s needs.
Investigate ways you can save with tools that integrate easily with other systems and cover multiple functions (for instance, all-in-one marketing intelligence solutions).
Vendor selection criteria
A smart investment requires financial due diligence when it comes to vendors. This involves:
- Compare pricing models (scalability, hidden costs, lock-in periods)
- Research ROI validation (case studies, performance benchmarks)
- A deep dive into compliance and risk assessment
Prioritize long-term financial performance
- Look at emerging tech. Consider AI, automation and predictive analytics for long-term scalability.
- Investigate what key vendors are investing in. What are their long-term plans to grow the software, and does this align with your marketing team’s (and your) goals?
How to optimize your martech spend
Cost-benefit analyses remove the guesswork and give you confidence that every investment will drive measurable returns. Here are steps you can take to optimize resource allocation for martech:
1. Perform a comprehensive audit
Before investing in new tools, assess what you already have:
- Identify redundancies: Determine if you’re paying for multiple tools that serve the same function. Measuring costs now gives you a baseline for comparison later.
- Evaluate performance: Are current solutions meeting business needs, or are they outdated and inefficient?
- Check for integration challenges: Make sure new investments will work smoothly with your existing systems to avoid hidden costs.
- Future-proofing: How well do your current tools meet your current and future needs? Will they grow with the team or are they aging out of use?
- Analytics over simple storage: Look for tools that empower your marketing team with the direct insights they need to take action when it’s needed.
Improved analytics means no more waiting until the monthly review meeting to realize that a campaign should have been turned off or ramped up in week one. Faster insights mean faster decision-making and better collaboration with the CMO.
2. Collaborate with marketing
A smart investment means drilling into what will actually move the needle and meet the needs of the marketing team:
- Sit down with relevant teams: Dive into the problems and challenges that the tool needs to solve for marketing and data engineers.
- Analyze available solutions together: Compare features, estimated costs, pricing models and vendor reliability with all relevant stakeholders. There’s no point getting marketing a great reporting tool that doesn’t integrate with your data warehouse, for example. Then, you’re just adding more resource wastage as IT scrambles to create spreadsheets and scripts to patch tools together.
- Benchmark against competitors: Assess how industry leaders are using martech for growth.
The key to a strategic partnership between you as CFO and your CMO is simplified metrics that keep you on the same page. Quantitative tools like centralized dashboards and cost-benefit analysis quadrants can help you compare solutions strategically.
3. Use a cost-benefit analysis quadrant for clarity
A cost-benefit quadrant is a simple way to separate smart investments from money pits. It helps you quickly spot which martech tools are worth the spend and which ones should be cut loose.
- Set your criteria: Start by defining what matters. Remember to factor in upfront costs like licenses and setup, as well as ongoing expenses like maintenance and training.
- Draw a 2x2 matrix: On the x-axis plot Cost (low to high), and on the y-axis: Benefit (low to high).
- Plot your martech options: Drop each tool into one of these four categories:
- High benefit, low cost (quick wins): No-brainer investments that boost ROI fast.
- High benefit, high cost (strategic plays): Worth the spend but need a solid rollout plan.
- Low benefit, low cost (nice-to-haves): Minimal impact, so only invest if budget allows.
- Low benefit, high cost (money drains): A bad investment that eats up resources without delivering value.
What this means for you as CFO:
- Prioritize quick wins for immediate impact.
- Invest in strategic plays if they align with long-term goals.
- Put nice-to-haves on hold unless extra budget is available.
- Cut money drains before they impact your bottom line.
The key to smart martech investment: weighing the full cost picture against the real business impact.
4. Weigh the risks of changing tech with staying with what you have
Every investment comes with risks. Identifying them early helps avoid costly mistakes:
- Vendor reliability: Research financial stability and customer support quality.
- Data security and compliance: Confirm that the solution meets industry regulations and cybersecurity standards.
- Adoption challenges: Consider running a pilot test to gauge usability before full rollout.
- New versus status quo: Moving tech is a big investment and involves a lot of moving parts, but with the right choices it can take marketing from a cost center to a strategic growth partner, so balance the risks of upgrading tech with the losses of sticking with what’s not working just to save the headache of moving.
By following these tips, you can make informed martech investments that drive measurable value while keeping risks under control.
5. Prioritize marketing intelligence
A marketing intelligence solution offers an opportunity for the marketing team to operate at peak efficiency, driving both cost savings and revenue growth. Here’s how:
- Data integration made simple: A marketing intelligence solution pulls data from all marketing platforms into one centralized dashboard, eliminating the need for manual entry and reducing errors.
- Boosted efficiency: By automating data collection and reporting, it frees up valuable time for the marketing team to focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down by tedious tasks.
- Better decision-making: With real-time, accurate data at their fingertips, marketing teams can quickly adjust campaigns, optimize spend and track ROI more effectively.
- No overhaul needed: A marketing intelligence solution integrates smoothly with existing tools, so there’s no need for a costly tech overhaul, just a more connected, streamlined system.
- Revenue growth: Long-term brand growth is hard to measure, making it difficult for CFOs to justify marketing investments beyond short-term returns.
Marketing intelligence solutions that can be used for advanced measurement methods like MMM (marketing mix modeling) and triangulation offer clear, data-driven insights to help you understand the real impact of advertising.
This means you can confidently allocate budgets that drive both immediate results and sustained growth, simplifying financial management between departments.
What this means for you as CFO:
A marketing intelligence solution is an investment in efficiency, accuracy and, ultimately, bottom-line growth.
An investment in marketing intelligence is an investment in growth
Martech isn’t just another marketing expense — it’s a smart financial move that keeps spending in check and delivers real, measurable ROI.
When you take a data-driven approach, you cut out the waste, make smarter budget decisions and ensure every dollar helps grow the business.
Picking the right marketing intelligence tool might seem like a job for marketing, but really, it’s about financial strategy. Your marketing technology can help your company align spend with revenue goals and make sure marketing is pulling its weight.
With the right tools, you’ll get better budget control, stronger collaboration with marketing, and a clear path to profitability.
Bottom line? Make martech work for you, not the other way around.