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This is the 8th yr we’re functioning The Stackies. It is an awards method that invites marketers to share a one slide illustrating their martech stack — the distinctive applications and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them performing jointly.
I’d inspire you to take part (deadline for entries April 29). It is a amazing way to add to our community’s knowing of how martech matches into the perform and move of contemporary promoting.
On the other hand, even if you never share your stack exterior the partitions of your organization, illustrating it can be an unbelievably valuable training to improved fully grasp it — and be equipped to clarify it to other stakeholders.
So what is the ideal way to illustrate your stack?
Turns out there are numerous techniques, every single bringing a distinct lens. Possessing reviewed hundreds of entries to The Stackies above the a long time — here are all of them from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 — I’ve distilled 10 styles that I have viewed on their personal and in mixture collectively.
1. Vendor Group Map
Generally utilizing the taxonomy from our advertising technology landscape, martech applications are organized into their product classes and subcategories. It shows your stack by means of the lens of a vendor industry map and identifies the solutions you’ve picked. This is a wonderful way to analyze your total stack stock and present the span of martech methods.
Here’s an example from SAS and their 2021 Stackie entry:
2. Consumer Journey Map
Another typical model is to align your martech stack against different phase of the customer’s journey. Generally for entries to The Stackies, the journey is simplified into 4-5 levels, these as Learn, Think about, Invest in, Onboard, and Grow.
This marvelous illustration from Juniper Networks and their 2021 Stackie entry illustrates two dimensions: the purchaser journey horizontally and the seller groups utilised vertically:
3. Again-Phase vs. Front-Stage
A different way of on the lookout at your stack is through a theater metaphor: back-stage and entrance-phase applications and platforms. Entrance-stage apps immediately touch the consumer — e.g., world-wide-web experiences, electronic mail strategies, social media engagement instruments, promotion, and so on. Back again-phase applications are used to serve inside stakeholders, such as analytics, scheduling, asset management, productivity, and so on.
This is an elegant illustration from Purple Wing Shoes and their 2017 Stackie entry, with back-stage to entrance-stage categorization along the vertical accessibility and shopper journey stage alongside the horizontal axis:
4. Purpose or Position-Based Map
Even though martech stacks can be pretty large, any just one particular person in the marketing division is unlikely to have to learn all of the apps inside it. Diverse roles inside of internet marketing will use distinctive instruments. So a further useful way of mapping your martech stack is to group applications by the roles or functions that use them. This is reveals the “who” dimension of your stack, which is practical to see the interrelation among apps, techniques, and outcomes.
This instance from Bigtincan’s 2019 Stackie entry illustrates three main roles: world-wide-web administration, promoting automation, and material marketing:
5. Point Solution/System Ecosystem Map
Integration is crucial to an helpful martech stack. Another fantastic way to visually examine your stack is to present the system(s) that are the gravitational middle(s) of your martech stack and which professional apps combine to each individual of them. It’s an ecosystem check out of your stack.
This instance from Poly’s 2020 Stackie entry essentially captures five different dimensions, together with relative investment decision, paid out/earned/owned methods, vendor group — and identifies platforms, built-in expert applications, and stand-on your own place alternatives:
6. Usage Map (Relative Time in Resources)
Some martech applications are made use of frequently, as an integral aspect of marketing’s working day-to-working day functions. Other apps, however, are a lot more specialized and made use of significantly less usually. This does not mean they are not important. They just have a time and put for their function. Determining closely-used primary instruments vs. lightly-utilized equipment specialists can be another insightful way to realize the composition of your stack.
This example from Airstream’s 2019 Stackie entry cluster apps mainly by their use case — planning, resourceful, engagement, vendor channel, and measurement — but the peak of the pine tree icons represents the relative time marketers shell out interacting with each device:
7. Relative Degree of Automation
Even though looking at the volume of time that users invest engaged with diverse instruments in your stack, it’s an interesting lens to examine how automated those equipment are. Which tools are used generally manually? Which types have sizeable automations? This check out can be beneficial both to fully grasp the relationship concerning tools and marketing course of action and operations. It can also assistance establish alternatives to automate.
Automation is the most significant frontier in Big Ops in my viewpoint.
This example from Paychex’s 2019 Stackie entry maps out their martech applications on two proportions: distinct internet marketing abilities and the degree to which they are automated:
8. Rate Layering of Platforms and Applications
In excess of a 10 years back, as tech stacks in general — not just martech — had been growing swiftly, Gartner proposed a way to manage them by “rate layer.” They advised a few levels: methods of file, units of differentiation, and techniques of innovation.
Devices of record really should be incredibly secure and have a sluggish pace of improve. They’re the platforms on which other application and companies depend. Methods of differentiation embody the processes and ordeals that make your business distinctive. They transform additional routinely, but are however rather secure. Units of innovation are extra experimental, the spot where by new abilities can be produced and piloted rapidly.
1 of the ideal Stackie entries was this a person from Microsoft in 2017, which mapped applications together the infinite loop of shopper journeys, but then also divided them into Gartner’s three rate layers:
9. Evolution of Martech Tools Around Time
Martech stacks never stand even now. New equipment are added. Old applications are changed. This is section of the normal evolution of a small business as it grows — and as the broader internet marketing and martech surroundings carries on to adjust around it. It can be helpful to examine your martech stack by way of the lens of its transforming application inventory more than time.
This case in point, despatched in by reader John Schott in 2017, demonstrates a 5-12 months journey of a smaller money products and services small business:
10. Linked Abilities Map
At the intersection of teams and equipment, abilities are produced. Relatively than hunting at your stack by means of the lens of seller groups, you can prepare a perspective all over various capabilities, this sort of as marketplaces, person-generated content material, material syndication, qualitative and quantitative research, etcetera. Mapping these capabilities in clusters, to demonstrate their adjacencies and associations with every single other offers you a image of the ecosystem around your stack.
This 2021 Stackie entry from Philips is a fantastic example:
Other Methods to Map Your Stack
Of course, there are many other approaches to visualize other dimensions of your stack.
For occasion, you may organize it all around aggregation technologies inside your martech stack. How are you horizontally aggregating details, workflow, practical experience, and governance across several distinct apps, information resources, and shopper touchpoints? Which equipment are you using to vertically integrate those people layers in certain domains, this sort of as CRM?
Alternatively, you may illustrate your stack to emphasize the diploma of customization inside of different applications and platforms. They may possibly vary of purely out-of-the-box commercial applications, to packaged goods that have been custom-made or prolonged with your possess code, to entirely custom applications that are exceptional to your business.
Just about every of these distinct methods can give you distinctive insights into the character of your stack — and assistance you talk them to stakeholders throughout your corporation.
What does your martech stack glimpse like?
Reminder: Even if you really don’t enter The Stackies you — despite the fact that we absolutely hope you do — never neglect to sign up for the no cost webinar on #MartechDay, Might 3. We’ll be unveiling the new 2022 martech landscape, releasing a State of Martech report, and celebrating the entrants and winners of this year’s Stackie Awards.
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