Braindrop: What Is a MarTech Stack?

What are MarTech stacks?

As marketers, we're all very wired to assemble the right mix of marketing tactics to meet our goals. From mobile marketing to search, social advertising, SEO, email, and CRM, the tactics we select become our marketing mix. Once we've established this marketing mix, we now have a growing number of technology or MarTech solutions that can help us execute the plan. The collection of these solutions becomes our MarTech stack.

So let's say your company's marketing mix includes email, social media, and mobile marketing. Your MarTech stack could look like this: Constant Contact for email, Hootsuite for social, Mobify for mobile marketing. While another company with the same marketing mix but other unique needs may have a MarTech stack that looks like this: Campaign Monitor for email, Conversocial for social media, and Verve for mobile marketing.

How can MarTech stacks help?

There are many technology choices available in many marketing categories. Nearly 4,000 marketing technologies in total were reported in 2016. So selecting the right MarTech solutions is getting to be more of a process in itself, but careful planning and assembly of your MarTech stack can lead to great things, like finally having platforms that are a proper fit for your organization's unique needs, more efficiency, less legwork, and simpler performance reporting—and tighter ties between marketing, sales, and operations in your organization.

How do you build a MarTech stack?

So where do you start your MarTech stack planning? I would suggest you start by taking inventory of what platforms you're currently using for each of your digital marketing activities. List them out. If there are contracts involved, note their end dates. See when you'll have another chance to evaluate your options. Perhaps list the pros and the cons of each platform. Are there features you would wish you had? Make note and look at this as an opportunity to more carefully select what you need when the next decision point arises.

Advanced MarTech stacks also incorporate what's called stack integration. This is where the various platforms are communicating with each other in various directions to create a true marketing technology system. There's even an award show now called The Stackies that recognizes the best of the best in MarTech stacks. Technology continues to influence everything around us, and our marketing plans are no exception. When we build our plans using these stacks of useful tech platforms as the foundation, our marketing performance improves. And that makes people happy.