10+ ways to visualize your martech stack

This is the 8th calendar year we’re working The Stackies. It’s an awards software that invitations marketers to share a single slide illustrating their martech stack — the distinct applications and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them performing with each other.

I’d persuade you to take part (deadline for entries April 29). It is a excellent way to lead to our community’s being familiar with of how martech fits into the function and move of modern marketing.

Nonetheless, even if you by no means share your stack outside the house the partitions of your organization, illustrating it can be an amazingly handy training to much better realize it — and be ready to clarify it to other stakeholders.

So what is the very best way to illustrate your stack?

Turns out there are several ways, every single bringing a different lens. Possessing reviewed hundreds of entries to The Stackies about the decades — here are all of them from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 — I’ve distilled 10 designs that I have observed on their own and in mix alongside one another.

1. Vendor Class Map

Typically making use of the taxonomy from our marketing technology landscape, martech applications are arranged into their solution types and subcategories. It displays your stack through the lens of a vendor market map and identifies the items you have chosen. This is a terrific way to look at your in general stack inventory and present the span of martech alternatives.

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

2. Purchaser Journey Map

An additional widespread design is to align your martech stack towards distinctive stage of the customer’s journey. Typically for entries to The Stackies, the journey is simplified into 4-5 phases, this sort of as Uncover, Look at, Obtain, Onboard, and Mature.

This terrific instance from Juniper Networks and their 2021 Stackie entry illustrates two dimensions: the consumer journey horizontally and the vendor categories utilised vertically:

3. Again-Phase vs. Entrance-Stage

A different way of hunting at your stack is by way of a theater metaphor: back again-phase and entrance-stage applications and platforms. Front-stage applications immediately touch the client — e.g., internet experiences, e-mail strategies, social media engagement tools, marketing, etcetera. Back-phase applications are utilised to serve inner stakeholders, this sort of as analytics, organizing, asset administration, productiveness, etcetera.

This is an classy illustration from Pink Wing Footwear and their 2017 Stackie entry, with back again-stage to front-stage categorization alongside the vertical accessibility and client journey phase along the horizontal axis:

4. Perform or Part-Dependent Map

Although martech stacks can be quite big, any one particular person in the marketing department is not likely to have to find out all of the applications in just it. Diverse roles inside marketing will use diverse tools. So another practical 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 useful to see the interrelation among applications, expertise, and outcomes.

This illustration from Bigtincan’s 2019 Stackie entry illustrates 3 most important roles: internet management, marketing automation, and information marketing and advertising:

5. Level Answer/System Ecosystem Map

Integration is important to an successful martech stack. Another great way to visually analyze your stack is to clearly show the platform(s) that are the gravitational heart(s) of your martech stack and which specialist applications combine to every of them. It is an ecosystem view of your stack.

This illustration from Poly’s 2020 Stackie entry actually captures five unique dimensions, such as relative investment, compensated/acquired/owned remedies, seller class — and identifies platforms, integrated professional applications, and stand-on your own point methods:

6. Usage Map (Relative Time in Applications)

Some martech apps are used continuously, as an integral portion of marketing’s working day-to-day operations. Other apps, however, are extra specialised and employed less routinely. This does not mean they are not important. They just have a time and place for their function. Determining intensely-applied major equipment vs. lightly-made use of equipment professionals can be another insightful way to understand the composition of your stack.

This instance from Airstream’s 2019 Stackie entry cluster applications primarily by their use case — planning, imaginative, engagement, vendor channel, and measurement — but the top of the pine tree icons represents the relative time entrepreneurs expend interacting with each individual instrument:

7. Relative Diploma of Automation

Even though looking at the amount of time that people devote engaged with distinct instruments in your stack, it is an appealing lens to take a look at how automated those people applications are. Which equipment are used largely manually? Which types have important automations? This look at can be useful equally to fully grasp the relationship concerning applications and advertising and marketing approach and functions. It can also assistance recognize alternatives to automate.

Automation is the largest frontier in Major Ops in my impression.

This illustration 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 automatic:

8. Pace Layering of Platforms and Apps

Over a decade ago, as tech stacks in basic — not just martech — were increasing rapidly, Gartner proposed a way to arrange them by “speed layer.” They proposed a few levels: units of file, techniques of differentiation, and systems of innovation.

Programs of file must be quite secure and have a gradual speed of adjust. They’re the platforms on which other program and products and services rely. Programs of differentiation embody the processes and experiences that make your organization unique. They transform extra frequently, but are nonetheless reasonably secure. Methods of innovation are much more experimental, the position where new capabilities can be developed and piloted speedily.

One of the most effective Stackie entries was this just one from Microsoft in 2017, which mapped tools together the infinite loop of shopper journeys, but then also separated them into Gartner’s 3 rate levels:

9. Evolution of Martech Resources Around Time

Martech stacks really do not stand however. New instruments are additional. Old tools are changed. This is element of the pure evolution of a small business as it grows — and as the broader internet marketing and martech natural environment continues to alter all around it. It can be practical to study your martech stack via the lens of its switching app inventory about time.

This illustration, despatched in by reader John Schott in 2017, exhibits a 5-calendar year journey of a compact financial providers business enterprise:

10. Related Capabilities Map

At the intersection of groups and equipment, abilities are created. Relatively than wanting at your stack as a result of the lens of vendor groups, you can arrange a see close to distinct capabilities, these types of as marketplaces, consumer-produced written content, information syndication, qualitative and quantitative investigation, and so forth. Mapping these abilities in clusters, to display their adjacencies and interactions with each other presents you a photo of the ecosystem all around your stack.

This 2021 Stackie entry from Philips is a wonderful illustration:

Other Methods to Map Your Stack

Of class, there are a lot of other ways to visualize other dimensions of your stack.

For instance, you could possibly arrange it close to aggregation technologies inside of your martech stack. How are you horizontally aggregating info, workflow, working experience, and governance throughout many diverse applications, knowledge sources, and shopper touchpoints? Which instruments are you working with to vertically combine these layers inside distinct domains, such as CRM?

Alternatively, you may illustrate your stack to emphasize the diploma of customization inside diverse applications and platforms. They might selection of purely out-of-the-box industrial applications, to packaged products and solutions that have been custom made or prolonged with your possess code, to totally personalized apps that are exclusive to your business enterprise.

Just about every of these unique ways can give you distinct insights into the mother nature of your stack — and enable you connect them to stakeholders across your group.

What does your martech stack seem like?

Reminder: Even if you really do not enter The Stackies on your own — despite the fact that we undoubtedly hope you do — do not ignore to sign up for the cost-free webinar on #MartechDay, May 3. We’ll be unveiling the new 2022 martech landscape, releasing a Condition of Martech report, and celebrating the entrants and winners of this year’s Stackie Awards.