Marketing budgets are stuck. According to Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets remain flat at 7.7% of company revenue, the same share as last year. After years of decline, this plateau might seem like a reprieve, but the reality is more brutal. CMOs are still trimming agency spend and labor costs, trying to squeeze more value from stagnant resources while ad prices increase and ROI concerns persist. As Gartner notes, "CMOs are getting less for each media dollar they spend."

This financial reality doesn't signal disaster for your digital experience ambitions. Instead, it highlights the need for a more adaptable and efficient approach to your martech stack. The Uniform composable digital experience platform (DXP) offers a different path that empowers CMOs to maximize impact while controlling costs.

Many martech stacks today are a tangled mess of bespoke integrations and legacy systems. Conventional DXPs require substantial upfront investment, lengthy implementation periods, and ongoing custom development costs. Adding new capabilities often means expensive glue code, long timelines, and a growing developer backlog.

The percentage of marketing budgets spent on martech has declined to 22%, down from 2024, as CMOs struggle with integration complexity and mounting technical debt. This puts digital marketing leaders in a challenging position: deliver better customer experiences while working with constrained resources.

Uniform's composable DXP represents a different approach to modern marketing organizations’ working methods that aligns perfectly with current budget constraints. Built from the ground up for composability, it connects content, data, and technology with clicks, not code. Unlike traditional solutions that require all-or-nothing implementation, Uniform lets you build incrementally, connecting the tools you already have and adding new capabilities at your own pace.

Many organizations have invested in best-of-breed technologies across content, data, commerce, and analytics. Rather than replacing these investments, Uniform is the connective tissue that brings them together. With 70+ pre-built integrations spanning everything from popular CMS platforms to widely-used commerce solutions, Uniform maximizes the value of your existing tech investments.

Each integration can be configured with just a few clicks, eliminating costly custom development. This composability means marketing teams can integrate existing tools without vendor lock-in or expensive glue code. The result? Faster launches, easier updates, and a future-proof stack that scales with business needs.

The Gartner survey indicates that 39% of CMOs plan to reduce agency budgets. The Uniform Visual Workspace is a game-changer that empowers marketing teams to create, manage, and optimize digital experiences without relying on expensive agency support.

By centralizing access to all your organization's content, regardless of where it's stored, Uniform puts creation power directly in marketers' hands. Teams can edit content inline, schedule releases, and run A/B tests without leaving the platform. This capability reduces dependency on external resources while accelerating time-to-market and freeing developers to focus on building high-performance components rather than firefighting day-to-day content updates.

Uniform MACH Start provides a ready-to-go foundation that streamlines implementation and shortens time-to-value. Instead of spending months on custom development, teams can begin building experiences immediately using pre-built components and patterns.

This approach enables organizations to develop once and reuse content across campaigns and channels, eliminating hundreds of redundant development efforts. These efficiency gains translate directly into budget savings and faster market responsiveness.

Uniform's architecture provides several technical advantages that translate directly to business efficiency and cost savings:

Personalization is table stakes for modern marketing, but it often comes at the cost of page speed and user experience. Uniform's edge optimization processes data closer to users, eliminating slow load times and flicker effects that kill engagement. Integration with leading CDNs like Akamai, Cloudflare, and Vercel ensures lightning-fast delivery.

Built-in A/B and multivariate testing tools let teams experiment and optimize in real time. Uniform Personalization delivers relevant content at scale without sacrificing SEO or performance, meaning CMOs can drive conversions and customer satisfaction without the usual trade-offs.

Uniform's AI capabilities go beyond automation. Its agentic AI tools, Scout and Sage, provide actionable insights on personalization, A/B testing, and SEO, helping teams continuously optimize experiences. The AI Hub lets marketers connect their preferred AI services, control prompts, and generate or localize content effortlessly.

This AI-driven approach accelerates content creation, enhances targeting precision, and surfaces opportunities that might be missed. CMOs get a multiplier effect on their existing resources, amplifying impact without increasing headcount or budget, democratizing access to advanced capabilities that would otherwise require significant investment.

Here are specific strategies for leveraging Uniform's composable architecture to maximize your investment:

Start with high-impact channels first. Start with your critical customer touchpoints and expand to additional channels as resources permit, ensuring every dollar delivers measurable results.

Leverage existing developer skills. Instead of requiring specialized knowledge of proprietary systems, use your developers' existing front-end expertise, reducing training costs and implementation complexity.

Increase reusability through the experience model. Uniform's approach to separating content from presentation increases reuse potential across channels and campaigns, eliminating redundant work and development costs.

Take advantage of built-in capabilities. Drive better conversion rates with edge-based personalization, A/B testing, and AI optimization that doesn't require additional tools, licenses, or specialized expertise.

While marketing budgets may remain flat, customer expectations continue to rise. Organizations that can deliver more engaging, personalized experiences despite resource constraints will outperform competitors stuck in inefficient traditional approaches.

Uniform's composable architecture ensures that every tool and integration directly supports business objectives and customer experience goals. By reducing reliance on custom code and enabling rapid experimentation, Uniform lowers total cost of ownership and accelerates time to value.

As organizations implementing composable architectures have discovered, the resulting efficiency gains aren't just cost-cutting measures—they're the foundation for delivering better customer experiences at scale. In a market where every budget dollar counts, that's the kind of advantage that translates directly to business results.

CMOs don't have to accept budget stagnation as a barrier to innovation. Uniform helps marketing leaders protect and maximize their investments, proving it's not just about surviving the budget crunch but thriving by working smarter, not harder.

Ready to cut costs and deliver exceptional digital experiences? Connect with us now to discover how Uniform's composable DXP empowers you to maximize your martech investments, launch faster, and outpace the competition—without increasing your budget.