I’ve been chewing on a question lately that keeps showing up in my work: what actually counts as a marketing platform? Not the high-level marketecture, but the real thing you end up building toward when a company grows past “we have a website” and into “we need a system we can rely on.”
A lot of tools call themselves a “platform.” A CMS calls itself one. Some SaaS tools take it even further and brand themselves as a DXP, a digital experience platform, promising content, personalization, testing, analytics, and half the stack in one place. That’s the pitch. But real marketing operations rarely match those diagrams.
Marketing work is iterative, cross-functional, and dependent on timing. And the systems that support that work evolve in ways that are far more layered, operationally and technically, than any vendor roadmap suggests.
So I’ve been trying to articulate what a marketing platform actually is in practice, especially inside companies that outgrow the idea that one tool can hold everything together.
A CMS is not a marketing platform
At its core, a CMS solves a specific problem: how to store, structure, and publish content. That’s essential, but it’s nowhere close to the full picture of how modern marketing operates. A CMS doesn’t tell you:
- whether the content is performing
- how personalized it should be
- how it fits into the journey
- how it interacts with experiments
- or how teams collaborate to move updates safely
A CMS is the home for content. It’s not the engine for growth.
A marketing platform is the ecosystem
The more I work in this space, the more a marketing platform looks like an interconnected system: tools, workflows, data flows, APIs, governance, design language, and delivery layers that let marketing operate with speed and clarity.
In most companies, it doesn’t look like the polished DXPs vendors sell. It looks like a tailored, composable version built over time, informed by the business, the audience, and the people doing the work.
Some parts of it are obvious:
- the CMS
- the frontend
- the design system
- the analytics pipeline
- the experimentation framework
- the asset pipeline
- the metadata and search layer
- the integrations and APIs that glue everything together
But the invisible elements are just as important:
- how content moves through review
- how requests flow
- how experiments roll out safely
- how versions are governed
- how data moves across boundaries
- how design tokens and content schemas enforce consistency
A marketing platform isn’t a single tool, it’s how all these components reinforce each other to make marketing predictable, fast, and safe.
This is where marketing platform engineering actually shows up: keeping the seams intentional instead of accidental.
Why the CMS sits at the centre
Here’s the piece that’s hard to get away from: the CMS really does sit at the center of everything. It’s not the platform, but it shapes the entire platform’s behavior.
- The content model becomes a data contract.
- The APIs define frontend architecture.
- The editorial UI shapes workflows.
- The schema affects analytics, personalization, search, accessibility, and consistency.
- The versioning patterns affect deployments and cross-surface stability.
You can switch analytics providers without rewriting your world.
You can rebuild your frontend without rethinking your operating model.
But switching the CMS? That’s a seismic move. Necessary sometimes, but never small.
Which is why choosing the right CMS matters. You want one that adapts as needs evolve, expands when the organization gets more ambitious, stays light when workflows demand simplicity, and avoids boxing the rest of the stack into awkward patterns.1
The CMS isn’t the platform, but it defines the platform’s shape.
The bespoke DXP most companies actually build
Commercial DXPs are the “buy everything” approach. But most companies end up building their own version over time, shaped by actual business goals, internal maturity, and the realities of the team.
At first, things feel messy or inconsistent. But as a company invests in clearer APIs, stronger content models, consistent design tokens, reliable data flows, and thoughtful governance, the system starts behaving like a platform, not a collection of tools.
Marketing platform engineering isn’t a rebrand of frontend engineering, analytics engineering, or design systems. It’s the discipline of ensuring the entire ecosystem behaves cohesively, safely, and predictably across content, delivery, experimentation, and operations.
No single existing discipline owns that. Someone has to.
That’s the direction I keep coming back to: a composable, API-literate, long-term marketing platform that grows with the company instead of constraining it.
I don’t have a perfect definition yet
And honestly, that’s fine. I’m still exploring it. I know a CMS isn’t the whole platform. I know marketing increasingly needs its systems to behave like unified, dependable infrastructure. And I know strong engineering practices, content architecture, design systems, and workflows matter far more than the vendor logo.a
But the shape of the definition is starting to form and feeling more right:
A marketing platform is the system that enables marketing teams to work at their best, consistently, repeatably, and at scale.
I’ll keep refining this as the work continues. For now, this is where the thinking lands.
Footnotes
- If all I need is a basic page, I don’t want to click around and create 5 different pieces, I just want to create a page. But if I need something complex for a large campaign, then heck yeah, I want to lean into reusability. ↩︎
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