Insight · MarTech

Roughly half of your MarTech budget is paying for tools nobody uses.

A five-step MarTech audit framework for SG SMEs. Cost reality, utilisation scoring, integration debt, and a kill / consolidate / keep / upgrade decision rule you can run in a week.

$Gary McRae, fractional CMO based in Singapore, PMC and CAIG accredited$

By Gary McRae

12+ years APAC · PMC + CAIG accredited · Singapore

Last reviewed 29 April 2026 · 9 min read

Gartner’s 2025 MarTech survey put utilisation at 49 percent , meaning roughly half of every dollar your team spends on marketing software produces no active output. The same survey found that only one-third of features in any given tool are actually used. Roughly 15 percent of organisations qualify as “high performers” getting positive ROI from their stack.

That’s an industry average. Your stack is probably worse. Most SG SME MarTech accumulates reactively, one tool added per quarter, each one solving a real problem at the time of purchase, and no formal review process to flag duplication, decay, or contract drift. Run the audit below and you will surface 30–50 percent in waste in a week.

The cost reality nobody calculates

MarTech now consumes roughly 20–24 percent of the marketing budget across most surveyed organisations, the CMO Survey reports 19.9 percent; Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey reports 23.8 percent. Both are projected to climb past 30 percent within five years. The number is already meaningful at SG SME scale.

The deeper issue is the true cost of each tool. Forrester research finds that licence fees represent only 30–40 percent of the total, the rest is integration middleware (USD 4–12K per year per tool), custom integrations (USD 10–25K per build), training (5–10 percent of platform budget), and admin overhead. Most SME stacks at S$5–50M revenue run 5–15 tools, USD 1–8K per month in licence fees, and a true cost of 2.5–3 times that headline number once hidden costs are included.

And the consolidation maths. When IBM consolidated 40+ marketing solutions down to five capabilities, they reported a USD 120 million cost reduction. Lenovo collapsed three platforms into one, saving USD 11 million per year, while content output went up 53 percent and click-through rates improved 12.5 percent. Neither company chose tools nobody used, the savings came from removing what was getting used poorly.

The 5-Step MarTech Audit

Five working days. One spreadsheet. The decision rule comes at the end. You don’t need a consultant to run this, you need a week of focused attention from one person who can pull contracts, log into admin panels, and ask honest questions.

01
Inventory & true cost
List every tool. Pull the credit card statements for the last 12 months, there are always tools nobody on the marketing team remembers approving. For each tool: licence cost (annualised), integration spend (middleware, custom builds), admin overhead (estimate hours per month × loaded labour cost), and contract renewal date. Total this up. Compare to your stated MarTech budget. The gap is the cost of "I didn't realise we were paying for that."
02
Adoption & utilisation scoring
For each tool, calculate two ratios: (active users in the last 30 days ÷ purchased seats), and (features actually used ÷ features available). Multiply. The product is your utilisation score. Anything below 30 percent is a removal candidate. Anything below 50 percent is a "train and monitor" candidate. The Gartner industry average is 33 percent; your goal is at least 60 percent on the tools you keep.
03
Integration health map
Draw the data flow. Which tools sync to your CRM? Which sync to each other? Where are you transferring data manually (CSV exports, copy-paste between dashboards)? Each manual transfer is a reliability and accuracy risk; each broken integration is silently degrading the data your team makes decisions on. The output is a one-page integration map showing every connection (or lack of one). Surface the manual data flows; they're the integration debt.
04
ROI attribution test
For each tool, name the specific pipeline contribution, revenue contribution, or operational efficiency it drives. Be ruthless: if you can't name it in one sentence, the tool fails the test. Tools that pass: connect clearly to demand generation, conversion, customer retention, or measurable time saved. Tools that fail (analytics tools nobody reports from, "social listening" platforms generating dashboards nobody opens) are removal candidates.
05
Decision matrix & roadmap
Apply the kill/consolidate/keep/upgrade rule (below). Build a 90-day roadmap: what gets cancelled this quarter (subject to contract terms), what gets consolidated, what gets reinvested in. Save the savings. The typical SG SME running this audit surfaces SGD 25–60K of annual cost reduction inside the first quarter. The bigger payoff is the integration debt unwound and the time the team gets back from feeding tools nobody benefits from.

The kill / consolidate / keep / upgrade decision rule

Apply per tool. The criteria are deliberately strict; loose criteria are how you got here.

Kill, Cost greater than 3 percent of your marketing budget AND utilisation under 30 percent AND no clear ROI signal. No exceptions for “but we might use it later.” Cancel at next renewal.

Consolidate, Feature overlap with another tool you have AND combined adoption under 60 percent. Pick the better-integrated tool, migrate workflows, decommission the duplicate.

Train and monitor, Cost under 3 percent of budget AND utilisation under 50 percent BUT a real ROI signal exists. Schedule team training; revisit utilisation in 90 days. If it doesn’t improve, demote to Kill at next renewal.

Keep / upgrade, Clear ROI AND high adoption AND integrates cleanly. Consider the next tier only if you can name the specific capability you’d unlock and attach a revenue or efficiency number to it.

Bloat archetypes, common stacks gone wrong

Recognise the pattern before you run the audit. These show up repeatedly across SG SME marketing teams.

The Analytics Hoarder

GA4 + Mixpanel + Amplitude + Heap. Four analytics tools, no unified reporting, three different definitions of “active user.” Fix: pick one product analytics tool and one web analytics tool. Sunset the others.

The CRM-as-Hub Trap

Paying for HubSpot Marketing Hub at SGD 4,000+ per month but only using it for contact storage. Email sent via Mailchimp; landing pages built in Webflow; analytics pulled from somewhere else. Fix: either commit to HubSpot as the hub (run email there, build landing pages there) or downgrade to Starter and consolidate around the right hub.

The Email Splinter

Brevo in marketing, Klaviyo in product, Flodesk for the founder’s newsletter. Three separate email tools, no shared suppression list, customers receiving conflicting messages. Fix: one email tool. The consolidation savings alone usually justify the migration cost.

The Free Tier Forever

Twelve free-tier tools each at 40 percent capacity. Direct cost: zero. Real cost: 15+ hours per week of admin glue work, manual data transfers, and team confusion about which system is the source of truth. Fix: pay for fewer, better-integrated tools. Free isn’t free.

The Legacy Shelfware

Marketo or Eloqua licence at USD 20K+ per year, kept “just in case” after a platform migration. Nobody has logged in for six months. Fix: cancel. The licence renewal is a forcing function for the conversation that should have happened twelve months ago.

The Integration Debt Spiral

Each new tool adds one or two custom integrations. After eight tools, the maintenance cost of the integration layer exceeds the feature value of any individual tool. Fix: stop adding tools that require custom builds. Audit existing integrations; rebuild only the ones with clear ROI.

The Best-of-Breed Myth

“The best email tool” (Klaviyo) + “the best CRM” (HubSpot) + “the best analytics” (Mixpanel). Each tool was the best in isolation; together they don’t talk. Fix: best-of-suite often beats best-of-breed for SMEs at this scale. Integration is a feature.

Frequently asked questions

How long should an audit take?

Five working days for an SG SME at S$5–50M revenue. One day each for inventory, utilisation scoring, integration mapping, ROI testing, and decision/roadmap. If it's taking longer, you're over-engineering it. The audit is a forcing function, not a research project.

Should I cancel before contracts renew, or buy out?

Depends on the contract. Most SaaS contracts auto-renew unless cancelled 30–60 days before the renewal date. If you're inside that window, the renewal is your forcing function. If you're locked in, calculate the buy-out cost against 12 months of unused licence, buying out is often the right call for tools you're not using anyway.

How do I get the team to actually use the tools we keep?

Three moves: scheduled team training (one hour per quarter per kept tool), assigned ownership (one named person per tool, accountable for adoption metrics), and quarterly utilisation review (the same metrics from your audit, run again, on the calendar). Without those three, adoption decays back to baseline within six months.

What about the AI and automation tools? Same audit?

Same five-step audit, plus a sixth step: AI governance review. Each AI-adjacent tool needs the data classification and consent checks from the AI governance pillar, what data enters the tool, where it processes, whether the contract permits training on your data. The MarTech audit and the AI governance audit usually overlap on 30 percent of the stack.

Can I use EDG to fund a MarTech audit?

Engagements with PMC-accredited consultants can qualify under EDG's business strategy or IT consultancy categories, up to 50 percent of qualifying scope, subject to Enterprise Singapore approval. The audit deliverable (a written stack rationalisation report) is exactly the type of consultancy output EDG supports. Worth applying if the audit scope is above SGD 30K.

What's the difference between an audit and a stack rebuild?

An audit identifies what to keep, kill, consolidate, or upgrade. A rebuild executes the changes, migrating data, rebuilding integrations, retraining the team. The audit takes a week. The rebuild takes 2–6 months depending on stack complexity. Run the audit first; only commit to the rebuild when the audit findings justify it.

Sources

About the author

Gary McRae runs MCR.AE, a fractional CMO practice for funded Seed–Series A founders and SG SMEs. PMC-accredited (Singapore Practising Management Consultant) and CAIG-accredited (AI Governance). 12+ years inside APAC marketing teams across fintech, legal tech, professional services, and regulated industries. The MarTech audit framework above is the same one used inside Discovery Sprints when stack rationalisation is in scope.

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