10+ ways to visualize your martech stack

This is the 8th year we’re working The Stackies. It’s an awards system that invites marketers to share a one slide illustrating their martech stack — the different applications and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them performing collectively.

I’d encourage you to participate (deadline for entries April 29). It’s a superb way to lead to our community’s comprehension of how martech matches into the functionality and move of fashionable advertising and marketing.

Having said that, even if you hardly ever share your stack outside the house the partitions of your organization, illustrating it can be an exceptionally handy training to better have an understanding of it — and be ready to clarify it to other stakeholders.

So what is the ideal way to illustrate your stack?

Turns out there are numerous means, each bringing a distinct lens. Having reviewed hundreds of entries to The Stackies about the years — here are all of them from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 — I’ve distilled 10 patterns that I have found on their have and in mixture together.

1. Seller Classification Map

Frequently making use of the taxonomy from our advertising know-how landscape, martech applications are arranged into their item types and subcategories. It displays your stack through the lens of a seller industry map and identifies the goods you have picked. This is a good way to examine your overall stack stock and clearly show the span of martech options.

Here’s an case in point from SAS and their 2021 Stackie entry:

2. Shopper Journey Map

An additional frequent model is to align your martech stack against diverse phase of the customer’s journey. Typically for entries to The Stackies, the journey is simplified into 4-5 stages, such as Uncover, Contemplate, Get, Onboard, and Mature.

This terrific case in point from Juniper Networks and their 2021 Stackie entry illustrates two proportions: the customer journey horizontally and the vendor groups utilized vertically:

3. Back again-Stage vs. Entrance-Stage

A further way of on the lookout at your stack is via a theater metaphor: again-stage and entrance-phase applications and platforms. Front-phase applications specifically touch the purchaser — e.g., website ordeals, e mail strategies, social media engagement equipment, marketing, and so on. Again-phase apps are used to serve internal stakeholders, this sort of as analytics, arranging, asset administration, productivity, and so on.

This is an elegant instance from Red Wing Footwear and their 2017 Stackie entry, with again-phase to entrance-stage categorization along the vertical entry and client journey phase together the horizontal axis:

4. Purpose or Purpose-Dependent Map

While martech stacks can be quite huge, any one individual in the marketing division is unlikely to have to understand all of the apps in just it. Diverse roles inside advertising and marketing will use distinctive tools. So another valuable way of mapping your martech stack is to group apps by the roles or capabilities that use them. This is reveals the “who” dimension of your stack, which is valuable to see the interrelation concerning applications, competencies, and results.

This illustration from Bigtincan’s 2019 Stackie entry illustrates a few principal roles: web management, advertising automation, and written content promoting:

5. Issue Remedy/Platform Ecosystem Map

Integration is important to an successful martech stack. Yet another terrific way to visually assess your stack is to display the system(s) that are the gravitational middle(s) of your martech stack and which expert apps combine to each of them. It’s an ecosystem perspective of your stack.

This case in point from Poly’s 2020 Stackie entry in fact captures 5 diverse proportions, like relative expenditure, paid/acquired/owned methods, seller classification — and identifies platforms, integrated expert applications, and stand-on your own issue answers:

6. Utilization Map (Relative Time in Equipment)

Some martech apps are made use of constantly, as an integral component of marketing’s working day-to-day operations. Other applications, nevertheless, are more specialized and employed fewer regularly. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are not beneficial. They just have a time and area for their function. Figuring out seriously-applied major resources vs. lightly-applied tools specialists can be one more insightful way to understand the composition of your stack.

This case in point from Airstream’s 2019 Stackie entry cluster apps generally by their use scenario — planning, resourceful, engagement, seller channel, and measurement — but the top of the pine tree icons represents the relative time entrepreneurs shell out interacting with every single tool:

7. Relative Degree of Automation

While thinking about the total of time that people devote engaged with unique tools in your stack, it is an intriguing lens to look at how automatic people instruments are. Which instruments are applied mostly manually? Which ones have substantial automations? This watch can be helpful both to have an understanding of the marriage involving instruments and advertising system and operations. It can also assist determine opportunities to automate.

Automation is the most significant frontier in Major Ops in my belief.

This example from Paychex’s 2019 Stackie entry maps out their martech applications on two dimensions: various marketing capabilities and the degree to which they are automated:

8. Speed Layering of Platforms and Applications

Above a 10 years back, as tech stacks in typical — not just martech — have been increasing quickly, Gartner proposed a way to manage them by “pace layer.” They suggested 3 layers: devices of report, programs of differentiation, and methods of innovation.

Methods of file should be extremely secure and have a slow tempo of alter. They’re the platforms on which other software package and solutions count. Programs of differentiation embody the processes and encounters that make your business enterprise unique. They modify extra regularly, but are still relatively secure. Systems of innovation are much more experimental, the position where new abilities can be created and piloted quickly.

One of the very best Stackie entries was this a single from Microsoft in 2017, which mapped applications along the infinite loop of buyer journeys, but then also divided them into Gartner’s a few speed levels:

9. Evolution of Martech Applications More than Time

Martech stacks never stand however. New instruments are included. Old equipment are changed. This is section of the organic evolution of a business enterprise as it grows — and as the broader promoting and martech surroundings continues to transform all around it. It can be valuable to analyze your martech stack via the lens of its shifting application inventory over time.

This example, sent in by reader John Schott in 2017, reveals a five-calendar year journey of a little money services business:

10. Linked Abilities Map

At the intersection of teams and applications, capabilities are made. Relatively than searching at your stack by the lens of seller categories, you can set up a look at all around different abilities, such as marketplaces, user-produced content, written content syndication, qualitative and quantitative investigate, and many others. Mapping these abilities in clusters, to show their adjacencies and interactions with each other offers you a photograph of the ecosystem about your stack.

This 2021 Stackie entry from Philips is a marvelous case in point:

Other Approaches to Map Your Stack

Of system, there are numerous other methods to visualize other dimensions of your stack.

For instance, you could arrange it about aggregation technologies in your martech stack. How are you horizontally aggregating information, workflow, experience, and governance throughout lots of distinctive applications, facts resources, and purchaser touchpoints? Which applications are you utilizing to vertically integrate these layers within unique domains, such as CRM?

Alternatively, you could possibly illustrate your stack to emphasize the diploma of customization inside unique applications and platforms. They could variety of purely out-of-the-box industrial applications, to packaged goods that have been custom made or prolonged with your possess code, to completely customized applications that are special to your business enterprise.

Each individual of these diverse approaches can give you different insights into the nature of your stack — and assist you connect them to stakeholders across your corporation.

What does your martech stack seem like?

Reminder: Even if you really do not enter The Stackies you — even though we certainly hope you do — do not forget to sign up for the absolutely free webinar on #MartechDay, May 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.