For this reason, when defining a strategic marketing and customer management plan, it is practically essential to also graphically determine the management flow of each interaction between customers/users and any of our channels, actions, or content, as well as the technological architecture involved for the correct execution of said management. This visual representation is what is known as the MarketingStcak.
Inbound Marketing and content marketing are the trend when it comes to getting our messages across, together with more modern tactics such as Social Selling and Account Based Marketing (ABM); and this has caused the number of information sources to increase almost exponentially.
If we follow Inbound Marketing methodologies, we will see that all of them summarize the complexity of customer management in four phases:
- Attract
- Turn into
- Close
- Satisfy
And in each one, different tactics, content, channels, and data must be taken into account, both generated and necessary, to make more accurate decisions with a greater probability of conversion.
To manage everything effectively, we have different platforms at our disposal. For example, as CMS there is WordPress or Adobe Experience Manager, and the customer relationship can be managed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Hubspot, among others.
A digital ecosystem that does not stop growing
We are faced with a list of solutions for each case that is difficult to narrow down, and that continues to increase year after year, although there are also voices that assure us that they will soon begin to consolidate through purchases and associations that simplify use by marketing professionals.
Noteworthy is the initiative of Scott Brinker. This marketing technology analyst, and now a HubSpot employee, has been organizing apps into a map that only grows for several years. He has dubbed it the “ Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic ”. It is arranged in categories and subcategories and, since 2011 when it began to draw up a list of 150 tools, every year that I have been attending its MarTech event, I have returned to Madrid with a poster with more and smaller logos, until now almost reaches 7,000 solutions.
This gives us an idea of a large number of marketing technology solutions. Which ones to choose for each phase of our business strategy? The answer comes through the Marketing Stack, also called the Marketing Technology Stack(Brinker himself calls it MarTech). It is not necessary to know the 7,000 tools, but at least be aware of all the categories of marketing software (MarTech) that we have at our disposal and know how to use them for our specific case.
What is the marketing stack?
The Marketing Stack is a way of clarifying sections such as multiple communication media or the Customer Journey, for example. The resulting diagram will represent the Digital Marketing management flow.
Associating the business framework with the applications to be used will facilitate the analysis of the work of the marketing department.
As outstanding advantages:
- Doing so forces us to capture graphically (and therefore make it more tangible) the model of customer management and digital marketing.
- To achieve this, it is necessary to merge the vision of the marketing team with the more technical section that will be responsible for configuring that vision into specific, automated, and measurable processes that will be executed with technological solutions.
- It is an opportunity to bring the team as a whole closer to a global vision of the marketing process and to understand how technology interacts.
However, representing the business and customer management process in a graph requires an analysis exercise that requires identifying and understanding the solutions used in each phase. It also helps detect digitization opportunities, steps where problems are occurring due to duplication of functions/tools, or bottlenecks due to lack of coordination or data management.
Representative examples
Do not think that creating a Marketing Stack is just a fad. Moreover, experts take it for granted that it will be part of management methodologies throughout the world, given its usefulness. It will come to join established concepts such as the scorecard, brand architecture, the sales funnel...
If you want to see a Marketing Stack, you can easily find examples on the Internet. The Bizible one (from 2017) is quite representative. It shows four main areas of work: Inbound, Intelligence, Analytics, and Collaboration, with the applications used in each area.
Others may show the customer management flow. This is the case of CISCO, which places the customer at the center of its MarTech (a clear example of its customer-centric vocation ). Four relationship phases (knowledge, purchase, installation, and renewal) and the platforms used in each phase are reflected here.
Microsoft also published in 2017, in the context of the Stackies Awards, the Marketing Stack of the team responsible for Marketing IT and Operations at a global level.
But carrying out a Marketing Stack is not only useful to clarify the technologies used in each phase. Some are seeing it as a marketing measure in itself. Proof of this is spectacular infographics such as BlackRock’s “MarTechtropolis”.
