This article was co-authored with Aparajita Mazumdar and Audrey Brosnan, experts in the Gartner Marketing Practice specializing in martech stack optimization, marketing technology, personalization and customer data management.
Marketing leaders are facing a new reality: the costs of running multichannel campaigns are rising at an unprecedented rate. Expenses tied to technology, labor and media are ballooning, fueled by the sheer volume of campaigns and the shift to consumption-based pricing models for marketing technology.
CMOs and marketing leaders with the highest marketing technology spend were nearly 2x as likely to report significant over or under buying of consumption based technologies, per Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend survey. As a result, leaders are caught off guard, underestimating the actual cost of their operations. This lack of visibility clouds the ROI and exposes organizations to significant strategic risk.
As brands strive to reach customers across more channels — social, email, search, display and beyond—the complexity and frequency of campaigns have soared. At the same time, marketing technology vendors are moving away from flat-rate pricing to models that charge based on actual usage. This means every additional campaign, every new segment and every piece of personalized content can drive up costs in difficult ways to predict and control.
Marketing leaders already have less room for strategic error in martech investments: According to the Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey, martech’s share of company revenue is 29% lower than in 2022. With shrinking budgets and rising costs, the pressure to maximize every dollar spent has never been greater.
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Deconstructing campaigns: The power of unit cost analysis
One way forward is to break down campaign operations into their component steps and apply unit cost analysis to each phase. Instead of viewing marketing technology and channel spend as monolithic, leaders should dissect their campaign processes into strategy, segmentation, channel configuration, content creation, review, execution and analysis. By understanding the cost drivers at each stage, marketers can pinpoint inefficiencies, forecast expenses more accurately, and align spending with business value.
This granular approach is more than just an accounting exercise — it’s a strategic imperative. With Gartner projecting that campaign volumes will grow tenfold by 2034, the old ways of managing budgets simply won’t scale. Unit cost analysis empowers marketing teams to make informed decisions about where to invest, which campaigns to optimize and which to eliminate. It also provides the transparency needed to justify spending to stakeholders and to adapt quickly as market conditions change.