Martech Center of Excellence: Build One That Works

A Martech Center of Excellence is a centralised function that governs how marketing technology is selected, implemented, and used across an organisation. It sets standards, reduces duplication, and ensures that the tools your teams are paying for are actually driving business outcomes rather than just sitting on a licence invoice.

Done well, it is one of the highest-leverage structural decisions a marketing organisation can make. Done badly, it becomes another layer of bureaucracy that slows teams down and gives executives something to point at when they want to look like they are taking operations seriously.

If you are thinking about how this fits into the broader discipline of running marketing as a business function rather than a creative department, the Marketing Operations hub covers the full terrain, from process design to performance infrastructure.

Why Do Most Martech Investments Underperform?

The honest answer is that most organisations buy tools before they understand the problem they are trying to solve. I have seen this pattern repeat across industries, from financial services to retail to travel. A new platform gets procured because a vendor gave a compelling demo, or because a competitor was seen using it, or because someone at a conference made it sound essential. Six months later, adoption is low, the data is messy, and the team that championed the purchase has moved on.

The result is a martech stack that looks impressive on a diagram and performs poorly in practice. Licences run in parallel. Data sits in silos. Integrations are half-built. And no one has a clear view of what the stack is actually supposed to do.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that broke repeatedly was tooling. Each new team would arrive with their own preferred platforms. By the time we had meaningful scale, we had overlapping subscriptions, inconsistent reporting, and junior staff who had no idea which source of truth to trust. The CoE concept, even applied informally, was what brought that under control. We designated ownership, set standards, and stopped letting every team make independent procurement decisions.

The marketing process breaks down fastest at the point where technology and people intersect without clear governance. That is the gap a CoE is designed to close.

What Does a Martech Center of Excellence Actually Do?

The function varies depending on the size and structure of the organisation, but there are five things a CoE should always own.

Tool governance and procurement

No new platform gets procured without going through the CoE. This is not about creating a bottleneck. It is about ensuring that every addition to the stack is evaluated against existing capabilities, integration requirements, and total cost of ownership. The CoE maintains the master inventory of what is in use, what it costs, and what it is supposed to deliver.

Standards and documentation

How campaigns are tagged. How data is structured. How integrations are built and maintained. These are not glamorous decisions, but they determine whether your reporting is reliable. A CoE sets the standards and ensures they are followed consistently across teams and markets.

Enablement and training

This is where most CoE models fall short. Governance without enablement is just policy. If the teams using your martech stack do not understand how to use it properly, the standards you set will be ignored or worked around. The CoE should run training, maintain documentation, and be the internal resource teams turn to when they need help getting more from the tools they already have.

Vendor management

Centralising vendor relationships gives you negotiating leverage and reduces the risk of being oversold. A CoE should own the renewal calendar, manage escalations, and track whether vendors are delivering on what they promised. In my experience, most organisations renew SaaS contracts on autopilot. The CoE is the function that should be asking whether the renewal is justified.

Performance measurement

The CoE should be tracking whether the stack is working. Not just whether the tools are switched on, but whether they are contributing to marketing outcomes. That means having a framework for evaluating tool performance and being willing to recommend cutting platforms that are not earning their place.

How Should a Martech CoE Be Structured?

Structure should follow function, not the other way around. The most common mistake is building a large team before the remit is clear. Start small, define the scope precisely, and expand only when the demand for the function is proven.

For most mid-sized organisations, a CoE of three to five people is sufficient to start. You need someone with genuine martech expertise who can evaluate tools technically, someone with a commercial background who can assess ROI and manage vendor relationships, and someone embedded enough in marketing operations to understand how teams actually work day to day.

Reporting line matters more than most organisations acknowledge. Forrester’s research on marketing org design has consistently highlighted that where a function sits in the hierarchy signals what it is accountable for. A CoE that reports into IT will optimise for technical standards. A CoE that reports into marketing leadership will optimise for marketing outcomes. Those are not the same thing. Marketing technology exists to drive marketing performance, so the CoE should sit within marketing, with a clear line to whoever owns the marketing P&L.

For global organisations, the question of centralisation versus regional autonomy is genuinely difficult. Forrester’s thinking on global and regional marketing operations is worth reading here. The short version is that global standards and local execution are not mutually exclusive, but they require deliberate design rather than assumption.

When Is the Right Time to Build One?

Not every organisation needs a formal CoE. The function earns its place when specific, documented problems exist that a governance structure would solve. If your martech stack is small, your team is unified, and your tools are well-integrated, a CoE adds overhead without adding value.

The signals that suggest you need one are fairly consistent. You are spending money on tools that teams are not using. You have multiple platforms doing the same job in different parts of the organisation. Your data is inconsistent across markets or channels. New tools are being procured without a clear evaluation process. Your reporting cannot be trusted because the underlying data is tagged differently depending on who set the campaign up.

I have sat in board rooms where the marketing director could not reconcile two reports that were supposedly measuring the same thing. That is not a data problem. It is a governance problem. And it is the kind of problem a CoE exists to prevent.

The timing question also intersects with organisational maturity. Building a CoE in a business that does not yet have stable marketing processes is premature. You need something to govern before governance makes sense. If your processes are still being defined, focus there first. The CoE comes after you have established what good looks like, not before.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes When Building a Martech CoE?

The mistakes tend to cluster around three areas: mandate, adoption, and measurement.

On mandate: CoEs that are given a vague brief will fill the vacuum with activity that looks productive but does not move anything. “Improving our martech capability” is not a mandate. “Reducing our martech spend by 20% within 12 months while maintaining coverage across our core use cases” is a mandate. Specificity matters because it creates accountability.

On adoption: The CoE can set every standard imaginable, but if the teams it serves do not use the tools correctly, the standards are meaningless. This is the enablement gap I mentioned earlier. I have seen organisations invest heavily in governance frameworks and almost nothing in training, then wonder why compliance is low. People do not ignore standards because they are obstinate. They ignore them because they do not understand why they matter or how to follow them in practice.

On measurement: If the CoE cannot demonstrate its own value, it will struggle to maintain internal support. That means tracking the right things from the start. Licence cost savings are easy to measure. Improvements in data quality are harder but more important. Reduction in time-to-insight, increase in campaign tagging accuracy, decrease in duplicate tooling, these are the metrics that tell the real story of whether the CoE is working.

There is also a cultural mistake worth naming. A CoE that positions itself as the gatekeeper rather than the enabler will generate resentment. Marketing teams are already under pressure to move quickly. If the CoE slows them down without giving them something back, they will route around it. The function needs to be seen as a resource, not a bureaucracy.

How Does a CoE Handle Data Privacy and Compliance?

This is an area where the CoE adds disproportionate value relative to the effort required. Data privacy requirements, particularly under GDPR and equivalent frameworks, touch almost every layer of the martech stack. How you collect data, how you store it, how you use it for targeting, and how you handle consent are all questions that require consistent answers across the organisation.

Without a CoE, these questions get answered differently by different teams. One market handles consent correctly. Another does not. One platform is configured to respect data retention limits. Another is not. The legal exposure from inconsistency is real, and it compounds over time.

The CoE should own the data governance standards that sit beneath the martech stack. That means understanding what GDPR requires from a marketing technology perspective and ensuring that every platform in the stack is configured accordingly. It also means staying current as regulations evolve, which they will.

For teams running email or SMS programmes, this extends to how privacy policies are structured and communicated. Mailchimp’s guidance on SMS privacy policies is a useful starting point for understanding what compliant communication looks like at the channel level. The CoE should be setting the standard here rather than leaving it to individual campaign managers to figure out.

The broader point is that compliance is not a legal team problem that occasionally touches marketing. It is a martech configuration problem that the CoE is best placed to own. The intersection of data security and marketing operations is increasingly where regulatory risk lives, and centralised governance is the most efficient way to manage it.

How Do You Measure Whether the CoE Is Working?

Start with the problems you built the CoE to solve. If you built it because martech spend was out of control, the primary metric is cost. If you built it because data quality was unreliable, the primary metric is data integrity. The measurement framework should be anchored to the original rationale, not to a generic list of CoE KPIs.

Beyond the problem-specific metrics, there are a handful of indicators that tend to be useful regardless of context. Tool utilisation rates tell you whether the platforms you are paying for are actually being used. Onboarding time for new tools tells you whether the CoE is enabling adoption effectively. The number of rogue procurement decisions tells you whether the governance model has teeth. Reporting consistency across markets tells you whether the data standards are being followed.

One thing I would caution against is measuring the CoE by activity rather than outcome. The number of training sessions delivered, the number of tools audited, the number of documentation pages written, these are inputs. They matter, but they are not the point. The point is whether the martech stack is more effective, more efficient, and more trusted than it was before the CoE existed.

Early in my career, I learned that the fastest way to lose credibility with a commercial leadership team is to report on effort rather than impact. A CoE that cannot demonstrate commercial value will not survive the next budget cycle. Build the measurement framework before you need it, not after someone asks why the function exists.

What Does a Mature Martech CoE Look Like?

Maturity in a CoE is not about size or sophistication of tooling. It is about how embedded the function is in the way the organisation makes decisions about technology.

In a mature CoE, procurement conversations start with the CoE rather than ending there. Teams bring problems to the function, not platforms. The CoE is involved in briefing vendors rather than just evaluating their proposals. The data standards are understood and followed without constant enforcement. And the function has enough credibility with commercial leadership that its recommendations carry weight.

Maturity also shows up in how the CoE handles failure. A good CoE is willing to recommend cutting a tool that is not working, even if that tool was championed by a senior stakeholder. The willingness to make uncomfortable recommendations is a sign that the function is operating with genuine independence rather than just validating decisions that have already been made.

The Optimizely perspective on marketing operations maturity is a useful frame here. The progression from reactive to proactive to predictive is not unique to any single function, but it maps well onto how a CoE evolves over time.

There is more on building the operational infrastructure that supports this kind of maturity across the full Marketing Operations section of The Marketing Juice, covering everything from measurement frameworks to team design.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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