Earlier this month, Scott Brinker revealed the 2022 Stackie Award Winners. The Stackies are a contest for organizations to submit a visible illustration of their martech stack. This 12 months, 5 totally different winners had been chosen.
My favourite a part of the Stackies is observing all of the other ways organizations select to arrange and catalog their martech stacks. After reviewing this 12 months’s entries, beneath are three of the commonest methods to think about organizing your martech stack and a number of the distinctive advantages of every method.
1. The shopper journey
Probably the most standard methods to arrange your martech stack is to align your applied sciences with the stage they help within the buyer journey. Completely different corporations have totally different terminology for the totally different phases, however it sometimes goes one thing like “Consciousness,” “Consideration,” “Buy” and “Onboard.”
On this instance, search engine marketing instruments would sometimes be categorized below the “Consciousness” section, whereas e-commerce platforms would simply match below the “Buy” section. When categorizing your instruments this manner, there are two challenges you wish to make sure you account for:
- Be sure you have a method to tag some applied sciences below a number of buyer journey phases. For instance, your advertising automation platform would possible be used throughout a number of phases, together with “Consciousness,” “Consideration” and “Onboard.”
- Additionally, you will wish to have a completely separate class or two for instruments used for inside functions that clients don’t essentially straight work together with alongside their journey. Knowledge and analytics instruments, in addition to inside workflow and collaboration instruments, would fall into these classes.
And there’s an additional advantage. Categorizing your instruments this manner offers you a fantastic visible to see what instruments are affecting a number of phases of the client journey and, subsequently, might require extra funding or assets. For instance, in case your advertising operations group has been pushing for elevated headcount, showcasing how the platform impacts almost each stage of the client journey might enable you to garner inside help from leaders even exterior of selling, similar to gross sales or buyer help.
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2. Know-how class or subcategory
Probably the most frequent and standard methods to categorize your martech stack is just by the know-how class they belong to. That is how the well-known Martech Panorama supergraphic, together with the brand new interactive MartechMap, organizes instruments. When organizing your martech stack, you may select to maintain your categorization on the highest degree, similar to “Promoting and Promotion,” “Content material and Expertise,” “Social and Relationships,” “Commerce and Gross sales,” “Knowledge” and “Administration” or you may select to get a step extra granular and assign your instruments in line with their applicable subcategories.
For instance, the subcategories below “Content material and Expertise” might embody “Electronic mail,” “Social,” and “Internet” amongst others.
One other additional advantage: One of many greatest challenges that advertising organizations face is the proliferation of applied sciences out there. Advertising and marketing organizations battle to take full benefit of their martech stack’s potential. In accordance with the Gartner Advertising and marketing Know-how Survey 2019, advertising leaders report using solely 58% of their martech stack’s potential, down from 61% in 2018.
Organizing your instruments by the class they belong to will help you simply establish the place there could also be alternatives for consolidation inside your martech stack. For instance, it’s possible you’ll uncover that you’re utilizing a number of survey instruments throughout the group as a result of particular person groups needing a fast survey have arrange free or low-cost accounts on platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Types. You will have a buyer expertise group utilizing a extra strong platform similar to Qualtrics, which handles buyer surveys. That might be a possibility to consolidate onto one survey platform.
Consolidating your martech stack will help you are taking higher benefit of your martech stack’s potential by slicing prices, decreasing information silos, and finally enabling customers to spend extra time diving deep into the entire out there options of 1 instrument and sharing that information with others.
3. Inside organizational construction
One other method to arrange your martech stack is by the inner groups answerable for working these applied sciences. For instance, a corporation might sometimes embody an information and analytics group, a advertising operations group, a content material administration group and an promoting group. On this state of affairs, one group might personal some instruments, similar to show promoting instruments for the promoting group or the web site CMS, which solely the content material administration group can entry. Nevertheless, there are possible fairly a couple of instruments that a number of groups have entry to, similar to some information and analytics instruments, like Google Analytics.
When categorizing Google Analytics inside your martech stack, it’s possible you’ll notice that it must be related to extra groups than you initially thought. After all, the information and analytics group has entry to Google Analytics, however so does the promoting group, who’s utilizing it to deal with conversion charges of their campaigns. The content material administration group might have entry to have a look at web page load occasions. The advertising Operations group may additionally use it to find out the best changing pages they need to incorporate into their lead scoring fashions.
Additional advantage? Cataloging your martech stack alongside organizational traces helps spotlight the place there may be shared entry and possession inside sure instruments. This offers you the visibility to make sure you have the correct insurance policies, procedures, and rights administration in place to make sure that totally different groups should not stepping on one another’s toes or working in numerous ways in which might finally harm total effectivity.
For instance, in Google Analytics, you’d wish to be sure that a number of groups don’t share editor rights, which might permit somebody within the advertising operations group to edit the default channel groupings, which might probably break a number of the ways in which the promoting group is optimizing spend throughout channels.
Learn subsequent: How startups and small corporations ought to construct their advertising stacks
When you categorize your martech stack by your organizational construction, arrange common opinions of instruments with shared entry to make sure that you have got the correct governance insurance policies in place and that they’re being adopted.
There isn’t any proper or mistaken method to categorize your martech stack, as every method has its goal and advantages. You additionally should not have to restrict your self to only one method. As you possibly can see above, taking the time to categorize your martech stack in numerous methods might enable you to obtain specific objectives or higher go well with you when sharing that visualization with a specific chief. Irrespective of the way you categorize it, a very powerful factor is to make sure you frequently audit and replace your martech stack.
Opinions expressed on this article are these of the visitor writer and never essentially MarTech. Workers authors are listed right here.
About The Writer
Megan Michuda is presently the SVP, director of selling operations and innovation at BOK Monetary. Previous to becoming a member of BOK Monetary, she served as international head of selling know-how at Janus Henderson Buyers. Janus Henderson was a Stackie Award winner in 2018. Megan is presently answerable for BOK Monetary’s advertising know-how stack, advertising automation, digital analytics, and advertising operations. In 2020, Megan’s startup Stacktus was acquired by CabinetM, a frontrunner in martech administration. Megan is now each a consumer of CabinetM in addition to an advisor. Megan obtained her bachelor’s diploma from Brown College and her grasp’s of science in know-how administration from College of Denver.
