This year we entered the Stackies competition held at the Marketing Tech Conference in San Francisco, where businesses submit a one-slide visualization of their marketing technology stack. The goal is to illustrate what technology the business is using, and they’re using it. The visualization is judged on the following criteria:
- Alignment — how well-aligned is your stack with your business
- Concept — how effective is the conceptual organization of your stack
- Clarity — how easy is it for a reader to understand your stack
- Design — the aesthetics of your slide and its visual appeal
- Detail — more detail is generally better, within reason for a single slide
With our entry, we wanted to show how quickly a business accumulates technology in their marketing stack. Even as an early stage startup, our marketing program uses 25 different marketing technologies. We have some foundational tech, but we’re also constantly trying new tech to see whether it will support our objectives.
Our Stackie illustrates three tiers:
1. The Customer Journey
We use technology in this tier to interface with our customers, from getting their attention in the Awareness stage, through driving conversions and nurturing our relationship with these customers.
2. Cross-Funnel Data and Experience Management
We use several tools to collect data about our customers and optimize the customer experience and otherwise manage relationships across the funnel. These are our Optimization, CRM and Analytics tools.
3. Operations
We have a few tools to centralize communication and provide a source of truth around our marketing activity and results. These are our collaboration and BI dashboard tools. MonkeyWorks fits in here as a collaboration tool, for sharing marketing plans and managing workflow, but also as a tool to alert teams in Slack if one of our marketing accounts from Tier 1 needs attention.
There are a lot of different ways to assemble a stack, and so many technologies to choose from. We hope that sharing our own stack will help other startups get a few ideas on how to set up theirs.
