Regardless of where a new tool or piece of technology fits in the overall landscape it is it is important to ensure that it is visible across the organization for a number of reasons:

• To manage the security risk of implementing new technology that accidentally exposes or corrupts customer data.
• To enable teams to learn from each other’s experience with any given technology and to increase efficiency by distributing product qualification tasks.
• To reduce spend by identifying redundant products or opportunities to lower spend by negotiating a single contract for the enterprise.

This is where the marketing stack comes in.

Marketing stacks showcase the technology in use across the organization and their relationship to one another. Stacks can be developed at the project, team, functional or enterprise level. They can be used to track products in use, in test and that have been retired.

There’s no right or wrong way to construct a stack — each stack ends up being unique to the organization and the objectives it serves. You just have to look at the Stackies submissions for the last two years to see how unique stacks can be. Stacks are a great way to audit and manage the technology in place and ensure technology visibility across the enterprise.

First and foremost, a framework needs to align to business goals. A framework aligned to business goals ensures that technology decisions 1) will support your organization's critical objectives and 2) will support the other technology in your stack towards the goal of achieving your objectives.

Customer personas and journeys offer a great starting point for building a marketing tech stack framework. Here’s why.

They align to your goals: Personas and journeys are the compass that guides the who, what, why and how of an organization’s work in reaching and engaging the reason it’s in business.

The structures are timeless: While some of the details within a persona may change, the overall outline generally won’t. A good framework can stand the test of time, being leveraged for the long haul.

With the analysis of millions of real-user data points, Ghostery has found that a large website has an average of 75+ digital technologies. To supplement this finding, a recent ActualTech Media & Soasta presentation noted that “a typical web page today can contain requests with upward of 75% happening via 3rd-party scripts.” The driving force behind our previous tag categorizations was an effort to better calculate the risk and ROI of these 75+ vendors.  

#1. The marketing technologist has “crossed the chasm.”

#2. Martech is eating adtech — and the big gulp is still ahead.

#3. Best-of-breed marketing technology stacks are thriving.

• Mythbusters: 10 Myths MarTech Vendors Tell by Theresa Regli of Real Story Group
• Best of Breed: The DNA of Unicorns by Isaac Wyatt of New Relic
• Building Your Ultimate MarTech Stack by Travis Wright of CCP Global
• One Profile to Serve Them All by Troy Steen of Dell

#4. Agile marketing is crossing the chasm too.

• A Herculean Story From Intuit’s Global Marketing Automation Rollout by Jaemi Bremner of Intuit and Pat Spenner of CEB Marketing
• Agile Marketing Measurement by Shubu Mitra of Coca-Cola and Jennifer Zeszut of Beckon
• Scaling Innovation by Christopher Penn of SHIFT Communications
• Agile Marketing: Your Key to Becoming a Modern Marketer by Brent Bird and Chris Savoie of Workfront

#5. Cognitive computing is coming to marketing frighteningly quick.

• Cognitive Marketing: The Rise of the Super Intelligent Marketer
• How Machine Intelligence Will Really Change Marketing — or — How to Market With Smart Machines Without Ensuring the Destruction of Mankind or Losing Your Job