10+ ways to visualize your martech stack

This is the 8th calendar year we’re running The Stackies. It’s an awards application that invitations entrepreneurs to share a single slide illustrating their martech stack — the various applications and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them operating alongside one another.

I’d stimulate you to take part (deadline for entries April 29). It’s a wonderful way to contribute to our community’s knowing of how martech suits into the functionality and circulation of modern marketing.

Nonetheless, even if you never ever share your stack outdoors the partitions of your corporation, illustrating it can be an unbelievably practical exercise to greater fully grasp it — and be ready to describe it to other stakeholders.

So what is the greatest way to illustrate your stack?

Turns out there are a lot of strategies, each individual bringing a diverse lens. Getting reviewed hundreds of entries to The Stackies around the several years — here are all of them from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 — I’ve distilled 10 designs that I have found on their possess and in combination jointly.

1. Seller Category Map

Often utilizing the taxonomy from our promoting technological innovation landscape, martech apps are arranged into their products categories and subcategories. It demonstrates your stack as a result of the lens of a seller market map and identifies the merchandise you’ve chosen. This is a terrific way to study your in general stack stock and display the span of martech remedies.

Here’s an illustration from SAS and their 2021 Stackie entry:

2. Shopper Journey Map

A further frequent model is to align your martech stack against distinctive phase of the customer’s journey. Normally for entries to The Stackies, the journey is simplified into 4-5 phases, these as Learn, Take into consideration, Purchase, Onboard, and Develop.

This wonderful illustration from Juniper Networks and their 2021 Stackie entry illustrates two proportions: the purchaser journey horizontally and the seller groups utilized vertically:

3. Again-Stage vs. Front-Phase

A different way of looking at your stack is via a theater metaphor: back-stage and front-stage applications and platforms. Entrance-phase apps specifically contact the client — e.g., world-wide-web experiences, e mail strategies, social media engagement resources, advertising, etcetera. Again-phase applications are utilized to provide internal stakeholders, such as analytics, arranging, asset administration, productiveness, etcetera.

This is an classy case in point from Purple Wing Sneakers and their 2017 Stackie entry, with back-phase to front-stage categorization alongside the vertical entry and client journey stage alongside the horizontal axis:

4. Perform or Function-Centered Map

When martech stacks can be fairly substantial, any 1 particular person in the marketing and advertising division is unlikely to have to understand all of the apps inside it. Distinct roles inside of promoting will use unique tools. So a different valuable way of mapping your martech stack is to team apps by the roles or functions that use them. This is reveals the “who” dimension of your stack, which is useful to see the interrelation between apps, skills, and outcomes.

This instance from Bigtincan’s 2019 Stackie entry illustrates three key roles: website management, promoting automation, and content material marketing and advertising:

5. Point Answer/System Ecosystem Map

Integration is essential to an efficient martech stack. Another excellent way to visually evaluate your stack is to exhibit the system(s) that are the gravitational middle(s) of your martech stack and which expert applications combine to each and every of them. It’s an ecosystem check out of your stack.

This instance from Poly’s 2020 Stackie entry basically captures 5 various dimensions, together with relative financial investment, paid/acquired/owned alternatives, seller class — and identifies platforms, built-in expert apps, and stand-by yourself place options:

6. Use Map (Relative Time in Applications)

Some martech applications are used continuously, as an integral section of marketing’s day-to-working day operations. Other apps, having said that, are more specialized and utilized significantly less routinely. This doesn’t suggest they are not beneficial. They just have a time and location for their goal. Figuring out seriously-applied most important tools vs. flippantly-used instruments specialists can be a different insightful way to have an understanding of the composition of your stack.

This case in point from Airstream’s 2019 Stackie entry cluster apps mainly by their use situation — planning, artistic, engagement, vendor channel, and measurement — but the peak of the pine tree icons signifies the relative time entrepreneurs expend interacting with every instrument:

7. Relative Diploma of Automation

Whilst thinking about the amount of money of time that customers spend engaged with diverse equipment in your stack, it is an fascinating lens to study how automated individuals equipment are. Which instruments are made use of largely manually? Which kinds have sizeable automations? This look at can be handy equally to comprehend the relationship concerning resources and promoting process and operations. It can also support determine opportunities to automate.

Automation is the greatest frontier in Massive Ops in my opinion.

This illustration from Paychex’s 2019 Stackie entry maps out their martech apps on two dimensions: diverse internet marketing capabilities and the degree to which they are automated:

8. Speed Layering of Platforms and Applications

More than a 10 years back, as tech stacks in general — not just martech — were expanding swiftly, Gartner proposed a way to arrange them by “rate layer.” They instructed a few levels: programs of document, programs of differentiation, and units of innovation.

Units of report must be quite stable and have a sluggish rate of modify. They are the platforms upon which other application and providers rely. Systems of differentiation embody the processes and experiences that make your enterprise special. They transform a lot more routinely, but are continue to rather stable. Units of innovation are extra experimental, the location wherever new abilities can be made and piloted speedily.

A single of the best Stackie entries was this 1 from Microsoft in 2017, which mapped tools together the infinite loop of client journeys, but then also divided them into Gartner’s 3 pace levels:

9. Evolution of Martech Tools In excess of Time

Martech stacks never stand however. New equipment are additional. Outdated instruments are replaced. This is portion of the purely natural evolution of a organization as it grows — and as the broader internet marketing and martech environment proceeds to adjust all around it. It can be handy to study your martech stack via the lens of its changing app stock around time.

This illustration, despatched in by reader John Schott in 2017, reveals a 5-12 months journey of a smaller financial solutions business enterprise:

10. Connected Abilities Map

At the intersection of teams and equipment, abilities are developed. Somewhat than hunting at your stack by way of the lens of seller classes, you can prepare a look at all over unique capabilities, these as marketplaces, user-created articles, content material syndication, qualitative and quantitative research, and so forth. Mapping these abilities in clusters, to present their adjacencies and interactions with each and every other provides you a photo of the ecosystem close to your stack.

This 2021 Stackie entry from Philips is a great example:

Other Ways to Map Your Stack

Of class, there are several other means to visualize other proportions of your stack.

For occasion, you could arrange it all-around aggregation technologies in your martech stack. How are you horizontally aggregating information, workflow, practical experience, and governance across many different applications, knowledge sources, and consumer touchpoints? Which applications are you working with to vertically combine all those levels inside precise domains, these types of as CRM?

Alternatively, you may illustrate your stack to emphasize the degree of customization within just diverse applications and platforms. They could selection of purely out-of-the-box commercial applications, to packaged products and solutions that have been customized or prolonged with your own code, to completely custom applications that are unique to your business.

Every single of these unique strategies can give you diverse insights into the mother nature of your stack — and enable you talk them to stakeholders across your firm.

What does your martech stack seem like?

Reminder: Even if you do not enter The Stackies on your own — although we definitely hope you do — really don’t fail to remember to indicator up for the free webinar on #MartechDay, Might 3. We’ll be unveiling the new 2022 martech landscape, releasing a Point out of Martech report, and celebrating the entrants and winners of this year’s Stackie Awards.