The Current UK SME Martech Investment
UK marketing budgets returned to growth in Q4 2024, with 21.7% of companies increasing their budgets, showing renewed confidence in marketing investment. UK SMEs had planned to spend £35.1 billion on marketing in 2024, with 33% prioritising investment in marketing capabilities.
However, a 2023 UK Marketing Maturity Report of ~2,000 SME decision-makers revealed 67% had no marketing action plan and over half had no business plan. While 68% of SMEs planned to increase their overall marketing budget in 2023, 63% say their biggest challenge is knowing the correct budget split per channel, and 25% struggle with understanding how to measure performance.
The SME Marketing Reality
In most small and medium businesses, marketing teams wear multiple hats. The marketing manager isn’t just responsible for campaigns and content, they’re expected to set up and manage the entire marketing technology stack, analyse performance data, build reports for leadership, and somehow find time for strategy between troubleshooting integrations.
Unlike large corporations with dedicated technical teams, SMEs typically operate with limited technical resources. You might have one developer who splits time between your website and internal systems, an IT manager focused on keeping the business running, or an external company handling your technical needs on a part-time basis. None of these resources are primarily focused on martech development.
This creates a fundamental challenge. Martech requires ongoing technical maintenance, but marketing teams lack the technical depth, while technical resources lack the marketing context to build something effective.
The Initial Build Is More Complex Than It Appears
Setting up basic martech might seem straightforward, connect a few APIs, pull some data, create some charts. The reality is far more involved. Each marketing platform operates as its own ecosystem with unique data structures, authentication methods, and reporting limitations.
Consider the complexity of tracking a single customer journey across platforms. Your prospect might discover you through organic search, engage with your LinkedIn content, click a Facebook ad, visit your website multiple times, download a whitepaper, receive several emails, and finally convert through a phone call. Connecting these touchpoints requires sophisticated data matching and attribution logic that goes well beyond basic API connections.
Marketing platforms also change frequently. Google Ads undergoes major API updates several times yearly, often breaking existing integrations. Facebook’s Business API regularly introduces new permission requirements. LinkedIn changes its data structure and access levels every few months. What works today might fail tomorrow, requiring immediate technical intervention.
Martech Challenges
Recent analysis suggests UK SMEs are wasting up to 60% of their marketing budget due to lack of tracking and optimisation. About 40% of SMEs had a CRM in place that was used effectively by sales and marketing by 2023, which means 60% did not.
While 64% of companies acknowledge lacking internal marketing technology expertise, utilisation rates have declined to just 33% of martech capabilities, with 44% of marketing stacks going completely unused amid integration challenges and skills gaps.
The Hidden Costs of Internal Development
Technical Resource Allocation
If you have internal technical resources, dedicating time to martech means less time for other priorities. Your developer or IT manager could be improving customer-facing systems, enhancing security, or building features that directly impact revenue. The opportunity cost of martech projects is often underestimated.
Learning Curve Investment
Martech requires specialised knowledge that most technical generalists don’t possess. Understanding multi-touch attribution, customer lifetime value calculations, marketing mix modelling, and privacy-compliant tracking takes significant time to master. This learning investment may never pay off if martech isn’t a core business competency.
Infrastructure and Compliance Costs
Proper martech requires robust data storage, processing capabilities, and compliance with various privacy regulations. Cloud infrastructure costs can escalate quickly as data volumes grow. GDPR and similar regulations add complexity around data retention, deletion, and consent management.
Ongoing Tool and Integration Costs
Building internally doesn’t eliminate software costs, it often increases them. You’ll need data storage, processing tools, visualisation platforms, and various APIs. Unlike managed solutions where these costs are bundled and optimised, internal builds often result in multiple separate subscriptions and higher per-unit costs.
The Maintenance Trap
The real cost of DIY martech isn’t in the initial build but in the continuous maintenance required to keep everything working. This challenge manifests in two critical ways.
Technical Maintenance Demands Marketing technology evolves rapidly, privacy regulations change frequently, and business requirements grow over time. Every change requires immediate technical attention:
- API updates breaking existing integrations
- iOS updates affecting tracking pixels requiring server-side solutions
- New marketing channels needing integration with existing systems
- Leadership requests for different metrics requiring fundamental data structure changes
The Scope Expansion Trap What starts as a “quick dashboard project” inevitably evolves into greater complexity:
- Requests for additional metrics from different teams
- Integration with new marketing channels as you grow
- Historical data backfills when systems change
- Documentation requirements for knowledge transfer
- Monitoring and alerting systems for data quality
- Compliance updates as regulations change
What the Original Scenarios Miss
- Failure rate – Many DIY projects fail and need complete rebuilds
- Skill gap – Most IT generalists lack data engineering expertise
- Scope creep – Projects grow beyond initial estimates
- Emergency fixes – When systems break, they need immediate attention
- Tool proliferation – You often end up with multiple subscriptions
This maintenance falls somewhere uncomfortable in most organisations. It’s too technical for marketing teams to handle effectively, but too marketing-specific for general IT resources to prioritise appropriately. The result is often a system that works initially but degrades over time as maintenance is deferred.
This scope expansion is inevitable, but rarely budgeted for in initial project planning.
A More Realistic Approach
Many successful SMEs take a hybrid approach to martech. They use managed platforms for data collection, storage, and basic processing, then build custom dashboards and analysis on top of clean, standardised data. This approach reduces technical complexity while maintaining flexibility for business-specific requirements.
Managed Platform Foundation
- Professional data collection and storage
- Maintained integrations with major platforms
- Compliance and security handled by specialists
- Predictable monthly costs
Custom Analysis Layer
- Business-specific dashboards and reports
- Custom metrics relevant to your industry
- Integration with internal business systems
This model allows marketing teams to focus on insight generation rather than data engineering. Technical resources can concentrate on customer-facing improvements rather than maintaining internal martech infrastructure. Leadership gets reliable, up-to-date intelligence without the ongoing resource commitment of fully internal systems.
Making the Decision for Your Business
Before committing to internal martech development, honestly assess your situation.
Resource Questions
- Do you have technical staff with available capacity?
- Can you commit 20-40% of technical resources ongoing?
- Do you have martech expertise in-house?
- Are you prepared for 18+ month development timelines?
Business Questions
- Is custom martech core to your competitive advantage?
- Can you afford 6+ months before getting actionable insights?
- What customer-facing improvements are you delaying?
- What’s the true 3-year cost including maintenance?
The UK Martech Context Points to Partnership
With 63% of UK SMEs identifying budget allocation across channels as their biggest challenge, and 25% struggling to measure channel performance, adding martech development complexity would compound existing strategic challenges.
The fact that 67% of UK SMEs lack marketing plans, combined with only 40% using CRM systems effectively, suggests that martech capability gaps already exist without adding development burden.
The Bottom Line
Recent UK research reveals that SMEs face significant martech measurement challenges despite renewed investment. With up to 60% of marketing spend potentially wasted due to tracking gaps, the priority should be implementing effective martech solutions quickly rather than lengthy internal development projects.
Given that 65% of software development projects fail to deliver on time, and 63% of SMEs struggling with budget allocation across channels, partnering with martech specialists allows SMEs to focus resources on strategic marketing activities that drive growth.
The question isn’t whether you can build martech capabilities internally – it’s whether you should, given the documented challenges, hidden costs, and opportunity costs involved in diverting marketing and technical resources to development and maintenance.
Every month spent building martech infrastructure is a month not spent optimising marketing performance and capturing market opportunities. The hybrid approach offers the best of both worlds – professional data foundation with business-specific customisation, allowing your team to focus on what drives growth rather than troubleshooting integrations.
Ready to Build Your Marketing Data Foundation?
With over 10 years working with SME marketing and data, we understand both the technology and the business challenges. Our team implements the tracking, attribution, and automation infrastructure you need, then manages it ongoing so you can focus on what matters, using the insights to grow your business.
