Consolidate from scattered services to a single solution

Marketing teams use more tools than ever, but keeping track of them all can be challenging. This material explains why consolidating marketing technology is important, the problems caused by scattered tools, and how a unified approach can help teams work faster and with more confidence.

Why marketing work feels harder than it should today

If you work in marketing today, chances are you’ve had moments where even a seemingly simple task feels unnecessarily complicated.

Imagine a small marketing team preparing a new campaign website. The goal sounds straightforward: launch quickly, stay on brand, and reuse existing content. But as soon as the work begins, friction starts to appear.

None of these issues is dramatic on its own. But when combined with a scattered ecosystem, they make everyday marketing work slower, more fragmented, and more exhausting than it needs to be. Add the hours your team spends trying to connect the disconnected resources, and the overall cost of a single simple campaign launch quickly becomes unsustainable.

And if you thought that certain industries are exempt from this reality, unfortunately, the opposite is true. In fact, Kentico’s 2025 research across multiple industries shows that marketers themselves clearly feel the strain of fragmented tool stacks.

This experience is no longer an exception. It’s a common, direct result of how modern marketing teams have evolved.

When growing needs lead to fragmented work

As marketing teams take on more work, they often add new tools to handle it. A new channel appears, a new request comes in, and another platform or app is introduced. Over time, these tools start to pile up, even though they were never meant to work together.

What started as a flexible response to ad hoc needs has slowly turned into a complex web of products that is as difficult to navigate as it is to maintain.

With more channels running at the same time – websites, email, social media, campaigns – it becomes harder to keep a clear overview of the whole ecosystem. Teams lose track of what content they have, where it’s used, and how different activities affect customers. As a result, work slows down, and decisions become harder, especially when deadlines are tight.

This situation is rarely caused by a lack of effort or skill. More often, the problem lies in the basic setup of the tools themselves, which were not built to support this level of coordination.

How consolidation works in practice

To show what consolidation brings to the table in practice, we’ll take a look at how a fictional company – let’s call them Zenith Financial – unified their marketing stack and moved from a scattered setup to a single platform: Xperience by Kentico.

This is not a story about features. It’s a practical walkthrough of how consolidation reshapes everyday marketing work when content, data, and execution live in one place.

From fragmented tools to one consolidated marketing environment

Before consolidation, Zenith’s marketing team worked across a wide range of disconnected systems. Their corporate website ran on Kentico Xperience 13, while targeted campaign sites were launched in WordPress, and some ongoing promotions lived in Squarespace.

Campaign execution varied by team as well. Some teams used Mailchimp, others relied on HubSpot. Lead nurturing was automated in different tools, including Marketo and Campaign Monitor, depending on the team. Customer data was split across multiple platforms, with CRM records stored in both Salesforce and Dynamics. Analytics and social media publishing were handled through various tools and dashboards that rarely shared data or aligned with each other.

Rather than continuing to optimize this growing collection of separate tools, Zenith made a structural change.

They decided to adopt Xperience by Kentico as their primary marketing platform. This allowed them to consolidate all content management, campaign execution, and customer data measurement into one environment.

From that point on, everyday marketing work started in one place instead of being split across multiple systems.

From asset overload to content as a strategic foundation

One of Zenith’s biggest challenges was content overload, or rather, overwhelm. Marketers spent a large portion of their time uploading the same images for different channels, tracking down the latest version of copy, and manually fixing endless inconsistencies. When a customer reported a broken link or outdated information, they had to hunt down all the instances where this URL was referenced. They had to scan every channel to ensure they displayed the latest information.

This left little room to focus on campaign quality or strategic messaging.

To address this, Zenith reorganized how content was created and reused. Content is now created once and reused across all their channels, with Xperience’s Content hub supporting this way of working as the centralized storage for various content types. If a typo is found in a testimonial on a product’s landing page, the marketer fixes it once, and the change is automatically propagated to other channels like the mobile app and socials.

Content editors prepare structured, reusable content in the Content hub. Marketers can then focus on the creative and strategic part of their work. For example, when launching a new campaign, a marketer can reuse existing product descriptions and visuals, adjust the tone for a specific audience, and focus on the campaign message rather than recreating copy and assets from scratch for each channel.

After bringing everything together into one solution and reusing their materials instead of copying them everywhere, Zenith saw several immediate improvements:

• Content duplication was reduced.
• Updates are now faster and less error-prone.
• Teams spend more time improving content quality instead of managing versions.

From campaign bottlenecks to marketer-driven execution

Launching a campaign page under the old system used to be a multi-week effort. Marketers needed to create content and then solicit developer help to build the site. This usually included a number of revisions, with the teams shuffling the campaign page several times for even the smallest content changes. Once finalized and approved, developers had to deploy and launch the new campaign page.

In Xperience, marketers take control over campaign execution. Developers set up reusable, brand-approved components in Xperience’s Page Builder, and marketers use these to build pages themselves within set guidelines.

This change didn’t alter what marketers are responsible for, but it significantly changed how smoothly they can work and how safe they can feel within Xperience guardrails. They can now:

• Build and adjust campaign pages without waiting for development.
• Maintain brand consistency through predefined components.
• Benefit from shorter and more predictable campaign timelines.

Developers remain focused on building and maintaining the underlying system, while marketers handle daily campaign tasks.

From disconnected forms to integrated data collection

Forms were another challenge for Zenith. Creating or changing a form often meant using several tools. When marketers created or changed a form field, they had to manually connect it to marketing automation systems and adjust the field configuration to ensure everything was stored and passed on in the correct format.

In Xperience by Kentico, Zenith uses the Form Builder to make data collection part of the same workflow as content and campaigns. Marketers create and adjust forms directly in the same space where campaigns run, and form submissions are immediately fed into customer data and follow-up activities.

This has opened possibilities for:

• Faster experimentation with form layouts and messaging.
• Immediate use of collected data in campaigns and customer journeys.
• Less reliance on technical handovers between teams for small changes.

Forms are now a natural part of running campaigns, not just separate technical elements.

From delayed reporting to actionable customer journeys

In fragmented setups, insights often arrive too late to influence live campaigns. Data is reviewed after the fact, when teams no longer have the possibility to react.

In Xperience, Zenith’s team can observe customer behavior as campaigns run. Using Xperience’s Customer journeys, they see how customers move through emails, pages, and forms, and what are the steps of the journey after which engagement drops off.

This ability to see real-time data and react to it, all within the same platform, allows marketers to:

• Identify drop-off between journey stages while campaigns are still active.
• Adjust messaging or content based on real behavior.
• Validate whether changes improve outcomes.

Customer data becomes actionable because it’s visible where decisions are made, not buried in separate reports.

From manual busywork to focused creative effort with AI support

A lot of Zenith’s marketing effort went into repetitive, low-value tasks, such as preparing image variants, writing alt text, or adapting content for different formats.

In Xperience’s consolidated environment, an AI-powered assistant – AIRA – is embedded directly into the content workflows. As with the other elements of the platform’s integrated setup, AI assistance is available right where marketers do most of their creative work. In this way, it can support everyday tasks without introducing a separate tool or process.

For Zenith’s team, this means:

• Less time spent on repetitive preparation work.
• Faster content delivery across channels.
• More focus on messaging, structure, and campaign strategy.

AI becomes a quiet enabler of efficiency, not an extra layer of complexity.

What changed for Zenith’s marketers in practice

After consolidation to Xperience, Zenith’s marketing team didn’t suddenly do different jobs. What changed was the shape of their work.

The marketing team is now able to work:

• In one primary environment instead of many.
• With shared content instead of duplicated assets.
• With timely customer feedback instead of delayed reports.
• With fewer handovers and less coordination overhead.

Xperience gave the team more space to focus on quality, relevance, and strategic decisions, rather than managing tools.

The diagram illustrates the difference between a fragmented marketing setup and a consolidated workflow in Xperience.

On one side, the marketer is surrounded by multiple disconnected tools. Each task requires switching contexts, copying content, syncing data, and coordinating work across systems. Steps are repeated, handovers are frequent, and progress depends on keeping many tools manually aligned.

On the other side, after consolidation into Xperience, the workflow becomes more direct. The marketer primarily works in a single environment where content, marketing activities, and customer data are connected. From there, content and related activities are delivered to individual channels without additional manual steps.

Zenith’s story shows that consolidation doesn’t remove all complexity from marketing. Instead, being able to keep most of your daily work in one environment takes away unnecessary friction from how marketing work gets done.

With this practical picture in mind, the next chapter looks more closely at what consolidation means from a marketer’s perspective, focusing on everyday work rather than just the technical architecture.

What “consolidation” means for a marketer

Consolidation, as a term, often gets overloaded with technical meaning, architectural discussions, or IT-led decision-making.

For marketers, consolidation means something much simpler and much more practical. It’s not so much about systems replacing one another behind the scenes, as it is about how everyday marketing work is organized when content, data, and execution live in one place.

At its core, consolidation is a way to reduce friction in daily work by removing unnecessary separation between related activities.

Why fragmented marketing setups make you work harder

In fragmented setups, marketing work is spread across multiple tools that don’t share a common foundation. As a result, even simple workflows become more difficult to sustain over time.

• Content is created in one place and reused elsewhere through copying.
  
• Assets are downloaded, reuploaded, and versioned manually.
  
• Campaign data needs to be combined after the fact.
  
• Updates often require handovers between teams.

None of these tasks is complex on its own. Together, they introduce delays, increase dependency on others, and make routine changes harder than they need to be.

At the same time, marketers are expected to stay flexible and productive across an increasing number of tools. Keeping track of where things live, how they connect, and what impacts what creates a constant cognitive load. Instead of focusing on improving campaigns, teams spend more and more time navigating systems.

Consolidation exists to address these conditions. Not by adding new capabilities, but by changing how marketing work is structured.

Consolidation means fewer tools, not fewer capabilities

A common fear is that consolidation means giving things up. In practice, it usually means the opposite.

When overlapping tools are replaced with a single working environment, marketers don’t lose capabilities; instead, they gain greater insight into what tools they can actually use. The functionality will still be there, but instead of a fragmented web of tools and interfaces, everything is readily available and connected.

For marketers, this typically results in:

• Fewer tools to access and maintain.
• Fewer interfaces to learn and remember.
• Fewer gaps where work has to be patched together manually.

The core needs of a modern marketing setup remain satisfied. What changes is the effort required to use such a setup effectively.

One place where marketing work happens

From a marketer’s perspective, consolidation is easiest to understand by answering one simple question:

Where does my work happen?

When you consolidate your marketing stack to Xperience, there is one primary workspace where marketers can:

• Create and manage content.
• Store and reuse assets.
• Access contacts and customer data.
• Plan and execute campaigns and customer journeys.

This doesn’t make marketing work rigid or simplified. It makes it connected. Related activities live together, making it easier to see context, move between tasks, and stay in control as work evolves.

Visibility through connected customer journeys

When customer data from different touchpoints is brought together in the same workspace where campaigns are created, visibility naturally improves.

Instead of working with isolated metrics, marketers can see how individual activities connect; how customers move from one step to another, and where engagement changes. This provides enough context to make informed adjustments without stitching data together manually or relying on separate reporting tools.

In Xperience, customer journeys are not about advanced analytics. Their role is to make customer behaviour visible where decisions are made, supporting confident day-to-day choices rather than deep performance analysis.

Greater autonomy in everyday marketing tasks

Another important outcome of consolidating into Xperience is autonomy.

In fragmented environments, even small changes often depend on technical teams. Publishing updates, adjusting campaigns, or responding to customer behaviour can require handoffs that slow your work.

In Xperience, marketers can handle most everyday tasks independently:

• Updating content.
• Adjusting campaigns.
• Working with customer data in a controlled way.

Technical teams remain essential, but their role shifts from constant operational support to strategic enablement. This benefits marketers and technical teams alike by reducing friction and focusing effort where it brings the most value.

At this point, consolidation should feel less like an abstract platform concept and more like a practical shift in how marketing work is organized. The next section focuses on how this shift affects daily work and what actually changes once teams move away from fragmented setups.

How consolidating into Xperience changes your daily work

When Xperience becomes part of everyday marketing work, its impact shows up in small but meaningful ways. Not as a sudden transformation, but as a steady reduction of friction in how tasks are planned, executed, and adjusted.

Instead of juggling tools, files, and handoffs, marketers work in a more direct, connected way. The responsibilities stay largely the same. What changes is how smoothly work moves from one step to the next.

Creating content once and using it everywhere

In Xperience, your team no longer creates content with a single channel in mind.

Instead of rewriting the same message across different tools, marketers create content once and reuse it wherever needed. When your team needs to make updates, they can make these in just one place. The changes will be reflected consistently across channels, without the marketers having to track down multiple versions.

This changes daily work for your team in practical ways:

• Less time spent duplicating content.
• Fewer inconsistencies between channels.
• Greater confidence that updates are applied correctly.

Content becomes a shared working resource rather than a one-time output.

Managing assets centrally and updating them in one place

The same principle applies to digital assets.

Images and other media are stored in one place and reused wherever they’re needed. When an asset changes (for example, during a brand refresh), marketers don’t have to replace it manually in every campaign or page. Updates are made at the source and automatically pushed through.

For everyday work, this means fewer last-minute fixes and less uncertainty about whether visuals are still current. It also reduces duplication, since assets don’t need to be stored and managed in multiple places.

Running campaigns without moving data between tools

In fragmented environments, launching a campaign often involves moving content, data, and assets between systems before anything can go live.

In Xperience, your team plans, executes, and adjusts campaigns in one place. Content, customer data, and automation are already connected, so marketers don’t need to prepare inputs for separate tools or manually align them.

As a result:

• Campaigns are quicker to launch.
• Adjustments are easier to make.
• There are fewer opportunities for things to break.

The focus shifts from managing tools to managing the campaign itself.

Making changes quickly without waiting for technical support

One of the most noticeable day-to-day changes consolidating into Xperience brings is speed.

Because content, campaigns, and customer journeys live in the same workspace, many routine adjustments no longer require technical handovers. Marketers can update copy, adjust campaign logic, or respond to customer behaviour as soon as they identify a need.

This doesn’t remove the role of technical teams. Instead, it changes when their involvement is needed. Technical experts focus on strategic work, rather than acting as gatekeepers for everyday updates.

For marketers, this means:

• Faster responses to real-world feedback.
• Less downtime during active promotions.
• More confidence when working under time pressure.

Taken together, these changes don’t just make individual tasks easier. They change how marketing work feels day to day, making it more connected, more predictable, and easier to manage.

In the next section, we’ll step back from daily tasks and look at the outcomes of this shift: the tangible benefits business users tend to notice once working in Xperience by Kentico becomes part of their routine.

The consolidation benefits business users really notice

To understand the benefits of consolidating into Xperience in practice, it helps to return to Zenith Financial and look at what changed for their marketing team once Xperience became part of their everyday work.

The most noticeable benefits didn’t appear as award-winning achievements or dramatic wins. Instead, they showed up in how the marketing team’s daily tasks felt easier to manage, how decisions were made with more confidence, and how work flowed with fewer interruptions.

Less mental overhead in everyday work

One of the first things Zenith’s marketers noticed was reduced in mental strain.

Previously, a significant amount of effort went into remembering where things lived, which tool was responsible for which part of a campaign, and how changes needed to be coordinated. After consolidation into Xperience, most daily work started in one place.

Faster movement from idea to execution

Another clear shift for the Zenith team was the smoothness with which work moved from planning to action.

Campaign preparation involved fewer steps because content, assets, and customer context were already linked. Small updates no longer require pausing work to align multiple tools or teams.

Fewer mistakes caused by duplication and rework

Before consolidating into Xperience, duplicated content and assets were a common source of errors at Zenith. Slightly outdated copy, mismatched visuals, or inconsistent messaging across channels required frequent fixes.

After the consolidation, the content was reused instead of recreated. Updates were made once and reflected across all instances. As a result, the team spent less time correcting mistakes and more time reviewing work with confidence.

More independence in day-to-day decisions

Xperience also helped Zenith’s marketing team rely less on technical support for routine work.

Marketers were able to handle most everyday adjustments themselves, such as updating content, refining campaigns, or responding to customer behaviour. Technical teams remained involved when their expertise was essential, but no longer acted as gatekeepers for routine changes.

Greater confidence when working under pressure

Taken together, these changes affected how the team felt during time-sensitive work.

With fewer tools, greater visibility, and more control over execution, marketers at Zenith felt more confident in their decision-making. When something needed to change, they knew where to act and how to do it without disrupting the rest of their work.

An example such as Zenith’s helps illustrate how consolidating your tools into one platform doesn’t remove all complexity from marketing work. What it does instead is remove unnecessary friction from how that work is organized.

The result is not a different job, but a more efficient way of doing the same work; with fewer interruptions, clearer context, and workflows that are easier to sustain over time.

Consolidate to build a foundation for future growth

By this point, you’ve seen:

• Why fragmented setups make everyday marketing work harder than it needs to be.
• How consolidation works in practice, illustrated through the Zenith example.
• What consolidation means from a marketer’s point of view.
• How daily work changes when content, data, and execution live in one place.
• Which benefits business users tend to notice once consolidation becomes part of their routine.

The remaining question is not what consolidation is, but what it means for the future. Let’s answer some of the related queries now.

Will Xperience still work for us as we grow?

Growth is one of the most common concerns around consolidation.

A consolidated setup is not designed around a fixed size or scope. Its value lies in a stable structure that can support more activity without requiring a large-scale rebuild. As teams grow, promotions become more complex, or responsibilities expand, the underlying way of working remains the same.

Instead of adding new tools for every new requirement as was the common practice under fragmented set-ups, teams working in digital experience platforms such as Xperience by Kentico build on an existing foundation. Growth happens within a familiar environment, which makes it easier to scale work without increasing complexity at the same pace.

What happens when we add new channels?

Adding channels is a natural part of modern marketing.

In Xperience, new channels don’t automatically mean new workflows or disconnected systems. Because content and data already live in one place, new touchpoints can reuse existing assets and follow established patterns.

This doesn’t eliminate the effort of launching a new channel, but it does reduce the amount of re-learning and re-structuring required. Teams can focus on adapting content and strategy, rather than rebuilding processes from scratch.

Does consolidating into Xperience make us more rigid?

Another common concern is whether consolidating martech services into a single solution, such as Xperience, limits your flexibility.

In reality, forcing teams to follow rigid processes that can never change or adapt to new challenges would be counterproductive. The real aim is to cut down on unnecessary variation in how daily work is managed, so there’s more room to experiment with what teams do.

When workflows are consistent and predictable, adapting strategy becomes easier. Teams don’t need to rethink their setup every time priorities shift. They can make incremental changes within a structure they already understand.

Next steps with your martech

If you find yourself hopping between tools, duplicating content, or endlessly copying assets by hand, and your whole setup feels overwhelming, the next step doesn’t have to be a decision or a commitment. It can simply be curiosity and deeper exploration.

You may want to:

• Review your current marketing setup and identify where fragmentation creates the most friction.
• Map out which tools support overlapping parts of your workflow.
• Discuss internally what “working in one place” could realistically look like for your team.

For further reading and perspective on consolidating your martech stack as a long-term strategy, you may find these articles useful:

• Steps to future-proof your martech strategy through consolidation – Learn practical, step-by-step guidance for consolidating your martech stack to reduce complexity, improve flexibility, and build a future-ready technology foundation that scales with your business.

• Boost your ROI: The transformative benefits of consolidation – Discover how consolidating your martech stack reduces costs, streamlines operations, and unlocks better data, personalization, and security. The ultimate goal is helping marketing teams drive stronger ROI with fewer tools.

Consolidation is not a one-size-fits-all solution, nor is it an overnight change. It’s a way of thinking about how marketing work is structured, with the goal of making that work more sustainable as teams, channels, and expectations evolve.