With the number of companies in the marketing technology landscape continuing to balloon, marketers are in a tough position to develop a cohesive marketing tech strategy.

In an October 2018 survey by Ascend2 of 145 marketers worldwide, more than half of respondents said that integrating disparate systems was a challenging barrier in developing a successful strategy for utilizing marketing technology. The results of the survey allude that merging together numerous systems is the most difficult challenge for many marketers’ tech strategies.

As digital ad buying has become more automated, many digital marketers have found themselves reliant on tech and data vendors. It isn’t unusual for marketers to have multiple vendors doing the same thing. For instance, those who buy inventory programmatically typically use multiple demand-side platforms (DSPs) to do so.

Having to access various dashboards when monitoring campaigns can be time-consuming. And having data sit in silos can prevent marketers from making the most of their available resources. Planning and analysis also become more difficult when disparate systems aren’t integrated effectively.

A third of respondents in a July 2018 survey of 560 marketing professionals worldwide by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services said that data silos prevent them from implementing real-time analytics. And about half of the 113 marketing professionals polled by Winterberry Group in November 2017 said that dissolving silos and centralizing data ownership would be one of the most important changes their organizations could make to get more value from their data.