How to find the right marketing platform for your business in 2026

Marketing teams often suffer from “tool creep”. They might start with one core tool, like a CRM, but as they venture into new channels, more tools start to sneak in. Select one for video editing, another for email marketing, one for partner marketing, and soon you’ll have built a Frankenstein of tools. In fact, mid-sized teams typically use between 12 and 20 tools .

That’s more tabs than you can comfortably manage in a browser, and it isn’t conducive to running connected campaigns. As a result, many teams are looking for a single platform that can do more, while still integrating with their non-negotiables.

If you’re not part of the 34% of teams that already use a single all-in-one platform, this article is for you. We are going to cover what you can get from a modern marketing platform and how you can use it to take your marketing to the moon.

• Consolidate multiple tools into a single all-in-one platform to run more connected campaigns.
• Clean and connect your data in one place so AI has the full context to deliver meaningful results.
• Use AI agents to optimise performance by monitoring campaigns and taking action.

A marketing platform is one place where you can manage your campaigns. It connects to channels like email, social media, SMS, and more to help you plan, go live, and measure your marketing in one place. It’s also a place to connect both your organic and paid marketing efforts.

Having all this information, and the ability to act on it in one place, is essential for teams that want to use AI effectively. Without it, AI lacks the full context needed to deliver meaningful results. This matters in 2026, as now 75% of marketing organisations use AI for high-stakes tasks like personalisation and performance prediction.

If you’re not using an all-in-one platform, your marketing is likely spread across a mix of different tools. Each one is designed to handle a specific part of your strategy, which is how most teams end up with fragmented workflows over time.

Here are some of the most common types of marketing tools:

These are single-purpose tools – for example, one for email, one for social scheduling, or one for analytics. They’re easy to get started with and work well for small teams. They might come in as you build out your team and new hires request access to the tools they already know how to use. However, they can quickly lead to tool sprawl as your needs grow.

Examples of point tools are:

• Mailchimp
• Hootsuite
• Ahrefs
• Google Analytics

Some of these are genuinely helpful as standalone tools. For example, most teams want to get their search analytics data directly from Google. This is when an integration can be helpful to pull all your data to one place.

These tools focus on automating campaigns. Many now include AI to personalise content and optimise timing. Generally, these don’t need to be standalone tools, as most modern marketing platforms offer these capabilities natively and connect them with other parts of your marketing.

These tools are designed to collect and unify customer data from multiple sources. They’re typically adopted when teams want a clearer, more complete view of their audience across channels. This allows for more advanced segmentation and personalisation. Again, these tools are also offered within most complete marketing platforms.

CRMs manage your customer relationships, often across sales, service, and marketing. They’re useful for tracking interactions and ensuring teams are working from the same customer data. Marketing teams typically want their CRM connected to their marketing platform, as it allows them to use real customer data to inform campaigns and personalisation.

Traditional marketing platforms help teams stay coordinated and measure performance. Now, they do much more. Here are some standout features that you’ll find included in premium marketing platforms.

AI agents are systems that can analyse data and take actions on your behalf, like your own personal assistant. They can help you generate content based on customer data, spot ways to optimise campaigns, or recommend next steps. Marketers using AI agents reclaim around eight hours per week and see a 20% increase in ROI.

Instead of you manually checking dashboards throughout the day, the agent does this continuously and draws your attention to issues only when they arise. This can be especially useful when you’re running multiple campaigns across channels, where small issues can easily be missed.

For example, if a paid campaign starts underperforming, an AI agent can detect the drop in engagement, adjust the messaging based on your guidance, and track the results.

First-party data is the data that your company collects directly from your customers. Often this is in the form of traffic, email clicks, purchases, and interactions with your brand. A ‘foundation’ simply means all of that data is stored in one place and connected.

When you have this data at your fingertips, you can make your marketing more relevant. For example, if a customer browses beauty products on your site, after a couple of days without a sale, you can use this data to send an SMS with a 15% discount on select skincare products.

This is the ability to run campaigns across multiple channels (like email, SMS, social media, apps, paid ads, and messaging platforms) from one place. If you’re managing campaigns across different systems, it can be hard to maintain a cohesive voice, which makes it harder for customers to recognise and build affinity with your brand.

A connected campaign might take someone from social media awareness through to a follow-up email, all as part of one connected journey. When we consider that B2B buyers go through an average of 27 touchpoints across different channels before a purchase decision, having the ability to coordinate them becomes a must-have feature.

Email is saturated, but with personalisation, it is possible to stand out from the crowd. Marketing platforms can use your customer data to send emails that change based on who the customer is, what they’ve done, or what they’re interested in.

Now, instead of sending the same message to everyone, you can tailor content so it feels relevant, which improves engagement. For example, if you have a customer who browsed running shoes, you can send them an email featuring the top-selling running shoes of 2026 and a gallery of celebrities and influencers seen wearing them.

Sometimes it can be challenging to keep on top of all your campaigns and how they support one another. While you might have a creative team that develops a bunch of assets, you may struggle to map how your customers engage with them across different touchpoints.

Journey orchestration helps you connect these dots. It allows you to automate the customer journey based on the steps they take, a bit like a ‘choose your own adventure’ game.

For example, if someone downloads your ebook and engages with your sales team, but then ghosts, you can place them into a re-engagement journey. This might include nurturing emails and retargeting ads on social media related to the topic of the ebook they downloaded.

Once you start looking at vendors, it can become hard to spot what makes each one unique. One example of this is that most platforms will now promise AI, but not all of them can execute on this in a way that's genuinely helpful for your team. While they might have an AI tool, this is very different from offering integrated AI agents.

To help you identify what platform might work best for your business, here is a snapshot of the top-rated options on Capterra .

Most marketing teams aren’t made up of data experts. That’s why your marketing platform should play a key role in keeping your data in check.

When the average organisation uses at least seven different data sources, it becomes easy for data to become inconsistent, outdated, or lost. This can lead to privacy concerns and make it harder for your team to segment and personalise campaigns effectively.

If this is the case at your organisation, you aren’t alone. We found that just under half of all marketing teams don’t have this data easily available.

If you’re considering moving to an all-in-one platform, this is a good opportunity to bring your data together and organise it in a way that supports how you want to work going forward.

You can do this by:

• Removing duplicate records
• Fixing missing or incomplete fields
• Standardising your formats (e.g. country names, phone numbers)
• Removing outdated or inactive contacts
• Checking for inconsistent naming across systems

Salesforce supports this through Data 360 Governance and Shield, which both help you enforce consistent data standards and protect sensitive information collected from your marketing.

Marketing teams struggle to see the value they are getting from AI if they simply start using it without any preparation. Here’s a quick guide to getting the most out of AI.

Start by looking at the data you already have. Most teams have some data in their CRM or other platforms that they work from. Pull a sample and check that it doesn’t have missing fields, inconsistent values or duplicates.

Now that you have the data, you need to bring it into a single place that your AI can reference. This includes your CRM, website, email, and any other touchpoints. As we’ve covered, AI works best when it can see the full customer picture, not fragments.

Look for platforms that have strong data governance, permission controls, and privacy safeguards built in, especially if you’re working with customer data.

Once you’ve chosen your platform, give your team some specific tasks to practice on. For example, ask them to:

• Generate three email variations for an existing campaign
• Summarise last quarter’s campaign performance
• Build an audience segment based on recent behaviour

Review outputs together so people understand what’s working and how you can improve on it.

Pick one channel, like email or paid social. Then define:

• What AI is responsible for (copy, segmentation, timing)
• What humans still control (final approval, strategy)
• Your goal (e.g. increase CTR by 10%)

This keeps things measurable and avoids miscommunications.

From here, you will want to check your outputs weekly. For example, review if your segments are accurate, if personalisation is reading naturally and feeling relevant, and whether you're seeing results improving compared to your baseline. Currently, 98% of marketers using AI report at least one barrier to personalisation, so it’s normal to experience some teething issues.

From there, you can adjust your prompts and fix any broken data sources based on what you find.

Many marketing teams are scrambling in the age of AI to figure out what happened to their traffic. While the number of people on your site might have gone down, the number of eyeballs on your content might actually not have changed.

This is why it’s important to track results in a more nuanced way. Here are some metrics you can track after implementing your new marketing platform that tell a more complete story.

It’s always important to track the percentage of users who complete a meaningful action, like signing up, booking a demo, or purchasing. This metric is still important in the age of AI search.

Connect GA4 to Agentforce Marketing to measure this at both a landing page and campaign level. You can also compare conversion rates by traffic source, especially AI referrals (look for ChatGPT or Gemini as a source on Google Search Console ) versus traditional search.

With less traffic coming through, your conversion rate becomes a clearer signal of whether your messaging and targeting are working.

Track how often people search for your brand name using GSC . Pay particular attention to impressions and clicks over time.

This matters because, as AI reduces clicks, it may still be mentioning your brand and prompting people to search for you directly, rather than discovering you through traditional SEO. An increase here is a signal that your marketing is still building awareness and trust.

Traffic is one thing, but what you really want is engaged buyers showing strong signals of intent on your website. Instead of focusing on traffic alone, look at the percentage of engaged sessions, time on page, and number of pages visited.

While AI has led to fewer visitors, those who do make it to your site are often higher intent. How you keep them once they arrive is a strong signal of whether you’re actually meeting that intent.

As a bonus, your CAC is a good way to determine if you're getting a strong ROI after implementing AI. You can calculate it by dividing the total marketing and sales spend by the number of new customers in a given period.

To make this more useful, break it down by channel or campaign. For example, compare paid social versus organic versus email-driven conversions. If one channel has a much higher CAC, it may not be worth scaling.

Salesforce is an all-in-one marketing platform for multi-channel campaigns that connects data, channels, and teams in one place. Here are a couple of examples of how our customers partnered with us to get more out of their campaigns.

R.M.Williams is an iconic Australian retailer known for premium boots and apparel. As it grew globally, the team struggled to get on the same page as they all used different systems. This also made it difficult to deliver a consistent, personalised experience for their customers.

To solve this, they implemented Agentforce Commerce, Agentforce Marketing, and Agentforce Service. This allowed R.M.Williams to personalise campaigns based on behaviour, pause messaging during service interactions, and improve product recommendations across channels.

As a result, they achieved a 176% increase in order value from targeted email campaigns and a 34% increase in online revenue.

As a result, they increased their omni-channel shoppers from around 12% to more than 30% in three years.