Consolidation

What is consolidation?

Consolidation in general means bringing multiple elements together to create something more streamlined, efficient, and manageable. It often involves reducing complexity, eliminating duplication, and combining scattered pieces into a single, stronger, more organized whole. Consolidation in the context of marketing technology (martech) refers to the process of reducing the number of disconnected tools, platforms, and vendors an organization uses to manage its digital marketing and customer experience operations. As the martech landscape continues to expand with thousands of tools across analytics, automation, CRM, content management, and more, many businesses end up with costly and fragmented stacks that slow down delivery and create unnecessary complexity. 

What is platform consolidation?

Platform consolidation is a specific type of martech consolidation where organizations reduce the number of single-purpose tools they rely on by moving from dozens of standalone products to a smaller set of broader platforms. Rather than consolidating everything into one system, teams replace fragmented tools for CMS, email, automation, personalization, analytics, and content storage with fewer, more capable platforms that centralize related functions. 

This approach significantly reduces the number of products and vendors to manage, lowers integration effort and ongoing maintenance costs, improves data consistency and governance, and creates a more efficient foundation for scaling digital experiences.

Why is consolidation becoming a priority for marketing leaders?

Digital marketing teams face growing demands: more channels to manage, higher expectations for personalization, and increased pressure to demonstrate ROI. A fragmented MarTech stack creates challenges at every stage including slower campaign delivery, inconsistent data, duplicated work, rising maintenance costs, and unnecessary security risks. 

Consolidation helps organizations reduce vendor sprawl, lower operational costs, improve collaboration between teams, strengthen data governance, and accelerate campaign delivery. By centralizing digital operations within one platform, teams gain efficiency, clarity, and the ability to scale experiences without adding more tools. 

How does consolidation impact the marketing team’s day-to-day work?

A consolidated MarTech environment simplifies a marketer’s workflow. Instead of navigating multiple systems for content creation, email, automation, analytics, and personalization, marketers work within one unified environment. This reduces tool-switching and removes the friction created by mismatched interfaces. 

It also streamlines campaign execution from ideation to delivery because content, customer data, and marketing capabilities are tightly connected. With fewer systems to learn and maintain, onboarding becomes faster, collaboration improves, and marketers can launch campaigns more confidently with clear visibility across all channels. Consolidation creates an environment where marketing teams work faster, make decisions based on unified insights, and spend less time on operational overhead. 

How does consolidation improve personalization and customer experience?

Personalization depends on accurate customer data, reusable structured content, and connected automation. Fragmented stacks make this difficult because insights live in separate tools, content is duplicated across systems, and triggers often break when integrations fail. 

Consolidation provides teams with a unified customer profile, a single content hub that feeds all channels, and native marketing automation that ensures consistent triggers and messaging. With connected data, content, and helpful AI assistance, personalization becomes more precise, easier to orchestrate, and more scalable across websites, emails, mobile apps, and portals. 

What are the benefits of consolidating onto a DXP?

A consolidated DXP offers unified content and marketing tools, faster implementation, lower total cost of ownership, reduced integration and maintenance requirements, stronger data governance, and centralized content for all channels. Teams benefit from consistent UI and UX, clear attribution and insights, and a streamlined environment that improves both speed and quality of delivery. 

Platforms like Xperience by Kentico help organizations eliminate redundant systems, reduce operational friction, improve collaboration, and deliver more advanced customer journeys without increasing complexity.