*UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026*
Summary: With over 15,000 marketing technologies available, many appear similar, so buyers, especially Microsoft Dynamics users, should prioritize how deeply a solution integrates with Dynamics rather than just comparing features and price. A marketing platform natively built within Dynamics delivers stronger personalization, AI-driven capabilities, tighter data security, and eliminates sync issues, helping IT and marketing teams maximize their Microsoft investment and drive better business outcomes.
There are more than 15,000 marketing technologies on the market today. With so many choices, as organizations look for new marketing solutions or re-evaluate existing ones, the tendency for the technologies to look the same becomes a very real challenge. That’s when it becomes vitally important to go beyond common considerations like features and annual pricing.
Another question often on the minds of MarTech buyers who are also Microsoft Dynamics users is this: How well does this marketing technology solution integrate with Dynamics? While it is a prevalent question, it is one that deserves more weight and clarity in the buying process.
There is a significant difference between a marketing solution that is merely integrated with and one that is natively built within Microsoft Dynamics. These differences in architecture make for vast differences in results. This can have a tremendous impact on entire organizations, but particularly for IT and marketing departments, as they have direct roles in implementing, maintaining and using the solution. In this white paper, we explore why native integration between MarTech and CRM is so critical for IT and marketing teams today and why it should move to the forefront of buying process considerations.
As the market and appetite for marketing technology has expanded rapidly in recent years, so too has the IT department’s familiarity with purchasing, implementing and maintaining marketing solutions. With this trend showing no signs of reversing course, IT teams would be well served – and would better serve their organizations – by building a marketing technology stack that natively integrates with Microsoft Dynamics.
Integrating disparate systems is a major challenge in marketing technology success for 56% of B2B marketers. – Click
Maximize the Investment in Microsoft Dynamics
A company’s investment in Microsoft Dynamics is not an insignificant one, either in terms of budget or resources. It is also often part of an organization’s commitment to a broader Microsoft infrastructure. IT teams can maximize the business investment in Microsoft technology with a native marketing technology solution that leverages the power of the Dynamics platform and Microsoft’s Common Data Service. By partnering with a vendor that aligns with Microsoft technology and is committed to growing with it, marketing solutions can help organizations realize a greater value and ROI from Dynamics, Power Platform, Office 365 and other Microsoft solutions.
One particularly valuable aspect of marketing technology that is natively built in Dynamics is that it can increase adoption and use of CRM. With essential marketing tools at their fingertips right within Dynamics, marketers will adopt and use CRM far more frequently. And with marketing technology often having uses outside of marketing – think communications for customer service, HR, training and others – the user base for CRM within an organization expands even further.
Only 8% of marketers feel that their marketing technology has been implemented well. – Oracle
More Robust Personalized Marketing
Gone are the days of batch-and-blast marketing. Consumers today expect personalized experiences from brands. A marketing solution that is natively integrated with CRM can deliver more robust, effective and efficient personalization than a non-native solution.
Native marketing technology has access to all the data in CRM, enabling advanced targeting and personalization utilizing any data from any entity in CRM. With Microsoft Dynamics and a native marketing solution, users can take advantage of the full Power Platform ecosystem to strengthen marketing initiatives – extend, customize and create workflows on sales and marketing data to execute classic Dynamics workflows, Power Automate, Power Apps and more. Users can also integrate sales actions such as assignments and sales activities based on marketing activity or as part of a marketing campaign. This creates the ability to have a single Dynamics campaign track sales and marketing activity – online and offline – for a complete picture of all activity and effectiveness that is not possible without native marketing technology.
Marketing technology decision-makers say that the leading barrier to a successful martech solution stack is platform integration – WEBFX
Native Integration Powers the Next Generation of AI-Driven Marketing
The case for native integration only strengthens as AI becomes part of the everyday marketing workflow. Tools like Copilot can build and refine Dynamic Marketing Lists using plain, conversational language (no query builder, no technical setup) because they’re working directly against live Dynamics data rather than a separately maintained copy of it.
A marketer can simply describe the audience they want, and Copilot identifies the right records, builds the logic, and keeps the list current as CRM data changes, with no manual upkeep and no sync delay. This kind of capability isn’t an add-on bolted onto Dynamics; it’s only possible because the marketing technology and the CRM share the same data layer in real time. As AI tools become a bigger part of the martech stack, native integration stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the foundation that makes AI-driven marketing accurate, current and genuinely self-service.
AI-assisted list building means marketing teams can go from idea to a live, self-updating audience in the time it takes to describe it, no ticket, no waiting on IT. Read our blog “Build Better Audiences with Copilot and Click: Smarter Email Marketing Starts Here” to see how it works.
Keep Your Customer Data Where It Belongs
One of the most overlooked advantages of a CRM-native marketing platform is data security. Traditional marketing automation solutions often require customer and prospect data to be synchronized, copied, or stored in external databases, creating additional points of risk and increasing the complexity of data governance. Native marketing technology eliminates this challenge by working directly within Microsoft Dynamics, allowing organizations to keep their data in a single, controlled environment.
Because marketing data remains inside Dynamics, organizations maintain existing security roles, permissions, compliance controls, and governance policies without needing to recreate them across multiple systems. There is no need to manage duplicate records, troubleshoot failed syncs, or worry about sensitive customer information being distributed across multiple platforms. This not only reduces security risks but also gives IT teams greater confidence that customer data remains protected, compliant, and under their control.
In an era where data privacy, compliance, and security are top priorities, a native solution provides peace of mind by ensuring your most valuable asset, your customer data, stays securely within the Microsoft ecosystem.
No Syncing Means No Breaking or Waiting
Data silos and moving data between systems can be one of the most significant, frustrating and persistent challenges for modern marketers. As the MarTech stack has grown in recent years, the integration and assembly of the stack has become too complicated, resulting in disparate and disconnected systems and processes.
A CRM-native marketing technology solution eliminates those challenges. It provides all the robust functionality marketing teams need without the time, stress and cost associated with integrating data between MarTech and CRM. An easy integration for IT is in turn easy for marketing. Upgrades are simple and automatic. Long mapping integration projects, data synching error conversations and time-consuming software upgrade initiatives become a thing of the past.
