10+ ways to visualize your martech stack

This is the 8th year we’re functioning The Stackies. It’s an awards system that invites marketers to share a solitary slide illustrating their martech stack — the distinct apps and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them working jointly.

I’d encourage you to take part (deadline for entries April 29). It’s a fantastic way to contribute to our community’s knowledge of how martech fits into the perform and movement of modern advertising.

Even so, even if you under no circumstances share your stack outside the house the partitions of your enterprise, illustrating it can be an exceptionally beneficial workout to improved understand it — and be equipped to reveal it to other stakeholders.

So what’s the ideal way to illustrate your stack?

Turns out there are quite a few methods, just about every bringing a different lens. Getting reviewed hundreds of entries to The Stackies about the many years — here are all of them from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 — I have distilled 10 designs that I have viewed on their personal and in mix together.

1. Vendor Category Map

Normally working with the taxonomy from our advertising and marketing technologies landscape, martech applications are structured into their products types and subcategories. It demonstrates your stack by the lens of a seller industry map and identifies the merchandise you’ve picked. This is a terrific way to look at your in general stack inventory and display the span of martech options.

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

2. Customer Journey Map

Another frequent design is to align your martech stack against unique phase of the customer’s journey. Normally for entries to The Stackies, the journey is simplified into 4-5 levels, this sort of as Explore, Contemplate, Get, Onboard, and Improve.

This fantastic example from Juniper Networks and their 2021 Stackie entry illustrates two proportions: the client journey horizontally and the vendor categories made use of vertically:

3. Again-Stage vs. Entrance-Stage

Yet another way of searching at your stack is by a theater metaphor: back again-phase and front-phase applications and platforms. Front-stage applications immediately touch the client — e.g., website encounters, electronic mail campaigns, social media engagement instruments, promoting, and so forth. Back again-stage applications are utilised to provide internal stakeholders, these kinds of as analytics, preparing, asset administration, productiveness, and so forth.

This is an tasteful example from Pink Wing Sneakers and their 2017 Stackie entry, with again-stage to front-phase categorization alongside the vertical obtain and purchaser journey stage together the horizontal axis:

4. Operate or Position-Dependent Map

When martech stacks can be fairly large, any 1 individual in the marketing office is not likely to have to understand all of the apps in it. Different roles in just marketing will use unique resources. So one more handy 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 helpful to see the interrelation amongst apps, expertise, and results.

This case in point from Bigtincan’s 2019 Stackie entry illustrates a few main roles: web management, advertising and marketing automation, and articles advertising and marketing:

5. Place Solution/Platform Ecosystem Map

Integration is crucial to an efficient martech stack. An additional wonderful way to visually review your stack is to present the system(s) that are the gravitational heart(s) of your martech stack and which expert applications combine to each individual of them. It is an ecosystem look at of your stack.

This instance from Poly’s 2020 Stackie entry essentially captures five various proportions, including relative financial commitment, paid/attained/owned solutions, seller class — and identifies platforms, built-in expert apps, and stand-on your own stage alternatives:

6. Usage Map (Relative Time in Applications)

Some martech applications are made use of continually, as an integral component of marketing’s day-to-day operations. Other apps, however, are extra specialized and applied much less commonly. This does not signify they are not beneficial. They just have a time and place for their function. Figuring out closely-used main resources vs. flippantly-applied tools experts can be another insightful way to have an understanding of the composition of your stack.

This instance from Airstream’s 2019 Stackie entry cluster applications primarily by their use situation — planning, inventive, engagement, supplier channel, and measurement — but the height of the pine tree icons represents the relative time entrepreneurs invest interacting with every single device:

7. Relative Degree of Automation

Although looking at the amount of money of time that users invest engaged with various tools in your stack, it is an intriguing lens to look at how automatic these instruments are. Which equipment are applied mainly manually? Which types have significant automations? This perspective can be valuable each to recognize the romantic relationship between resources and marketing approach and functions. It can also assist discover alternatives to automate.

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

This example from Paychex’s 2019 Stackie entry maps out their martech applications on two proportions: different advertising and marketing abilities and the diploma to which they are automated:

8. Speed Layering of Platforms and Applications

Over a 10 years ago, as tech stacks in normal — not just martech — were growing promptly, Gartner proposed a way to manage them by “rate layer.” They recommended 3 levels: programs of file, programs of differentiation, and techniques of innovation.

Systems of file really should be quite steady and have a sluggish pace of modify. They’re the platforms upon which other computer software and services depend. Programs of differentiation embody the procedures and ordeals that make your business enterprise exceptional. They change additional routinely, but are nevertheless fairly stable. Systems of innovation are much more experimental, the spot the place new capabilities can be designed and piloted immediately.

1 of the best Stackie entries was this a single from Microsoft in 2017, which mapped equipment along the infinite loop of customer journeys, but then also separated them into Gartner’s a few pace levels:

9. Evolution of Martech Resources Around Time

Martech stacks really do not stand even now. New equipment are extra. Outdated instruments are replaced. This is element of the purely natural evolution of a business enterprise as it grows — and as the broader promoting and martech environment continues to transform all over it. It can be useful to study your martech stack as a result of the lens of its switching app inventory about time.

This instance, sent in by reader John Schott in 2017, demonstrates a 5-12 months journey of a smaller fiscal products and services small business:

10. Linked Abilities Map

At the intersection of teams and equipment, capabilities are produced. Rather than searching at your stack by way of the lens of seller classes, you can prepare a view around different capabilities, this kind of as marketplaces, person-produced content material, information syndication, qualitative and quantitative investigation, and many others. Mapping these abilities in clusters, to demonstrate their adjacencies and relationships with each individual other gives you a photo of the ecosystem all over your stack.

This 2021 Stackie entry from Philips is a terrific example:

Other Strategies to Map Your Stack

Of training course, there are a lot of other techniques to visualize other dimensions of your stack.

For instance, you might arrange it all around aggregation systems within just your martech stack. How are you horizontally aggregating details, workflow, encounter, and governance across many distinct apps, data sources, and buyer touchpoints? Which instruments are you using to vertically integrate these levels within just unique domains, these as CRM?

Alternatively, you may possibly illustrate your stack to emphasize the diploma of customization in different applications and platforms. They may selection of purely out-of-the-box business applications, to packaged products and solutions that have been tailored or extended with your personal code, to entirely personalized apps that are exclusive to your organization.

Just about every of these unique ways can give you diverse insights into the character of your stack — and enable you communicate them to stakeholders throughout your group.

What does your martech stack look like?

Reminder: Even if you really do not enter The Stackies on your own — though we surely hope you do — never fail to remember to sign up for the totally free webinar on #MartechDay, May possibly 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.