Has Your Martech Stack Become “Usefuless”?

As we plan for 2019, let’s detach from past and stand up to the future. Let’s discuss how to map the martech stack you already have and rescue it from usefuless-ness, says, Jake Athey, VP of Marketing at Widen.

Let’s pretend that your 2019 Near Year’s Resolution is to become a minimalist, but not the Instagram kind. You don’t plan to move your family into a tiny home or trade your minivan for a quad tandem bike. However, you have an unkempt, overloaded tool chest where useful things disappear, and useless things reappear. One might say that that tool chest is “usefuless.”  

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Come to think of it, that tool chest is a lot like your martech stack. And golly gee, it’s 2019 planning season!

Perhaps businesses have an annual planning season because, otherwise, few of us would let go of our treasured tools, projects, and budgets. The Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo writes a convincing explanation for why in her book about decluttering: “…when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”

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We get attached to the past, the events through which we vetted a martech solution and the moments in which it performed. We fear letting go, because what if that dusty tool delivers a massive victory or averts a catastrophe? Martech stacks become maximalist rather than minimalist because we want to be ready for every contingency we fear, and stockpiling platforms is an inefficient way to accomplish that.

Thus, the choice to map your martech stack is a lot like a minimalist NYE resolution. It’s an act of willpower to give up our treasures, no matter how little we use them. Most marketing teams have too much-underused stuff because it’s easy to justify new purchases but hard to make maintenance sexy.

As we plan for 2019, let’s detach from past and stand up to the future. Let’s discuss how to map the martech stack you already have and rescue it from usefuless-ness.

1. The Mapping Process

Every year, Scott Brinker hosts the Stackies, a contest for marketing technology stacks. The 2018 winners show that there are myriad of ways to map a stack.

BlackRock, a 2018 winner, submitted a MarTechtropolis that divided its platforms into neighborhoods focused on discovery, planning, conceptualization, and execution. Earth Networks’ Marketological Forecasting Stack looks like a weather report, while Element Three modeled its stack on a movie theater. Catch Me If You Can, of course, was all about lead capturing and lead nurturing.

We could map a stack by team, workflow, experience, or assets, but notice that the Stackie winners all thought in terms of categories defined by purposes. Rather than a paper map, the martech stack is more like a Waze map that overlays dynamism upon static terrain. It’s a series of events and relationships.

Map your stack by emulating one of these outstanding models, or by blazing your own trail. As you will see next, a martech map should be enjoyable to share.

2. The Card Trading Model

Back in the 1990s, baseball cards were “totally sweet” (or whatever we said then). If you and I wanted to trade, we’d open our bulky, padded binders where we stuff baseball cards into plastic slots. We’d see who’s got what. We’d make comparisons between our collections to identify where we’re deficient or strong.

Similarly, I believe martech technologists should compare stacks face-to-face, just like kids trading baseball cards. It’s too hard to understand our stacks in isolation.

Here’s a real example: I compared stacks with Ryan Balsiger, Digital Marketing Manager at Renaissance Learning, a client of Widen’s.

First, we identified anchor platforms, the most valuable cards in our collection. Widen Collective, Marketo, and Microsoft Dynamics were the anchors for Renaissance. In Widen’s case, it’s our own DAM system, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

Without a trading partner, we might not have recognized our shared weakness. Both Renaissance and Widen have multiple analytics platform and no way to normalize, aggregate, and make sense of the disparate data. We each put an analytics platform on our Christmas list.

All told, Widen has 28 platforms in its stack. Could we add another and really be minimalist?

3. Minimizing

This trade of knowledge between Ryan and I pointed to promising, uncharted territory for our martech maps. It also made us cognizant of tools we had but weren’t using to full potential.

Why were they so usefuless? Was an administrator not trained well enough? Was user adoption poor? Were there redundancies or missing integrations?

Minimalizing is like an interrogation that gradually leads to the real questions: What are you? What are you doing in our stack? Why do we need you?

Even when I look at Widen’s own DAM system, I play the role of interrogator. How’s our user adoption? Are logins, asset downloads, and asset shares going up or down? How are views of embedded content trending? If the numbers trended poorly, it’s maintenance time (and it wouldn’t be the first time!).

Part of minimizing a stack is maximizing what you already have. If we added an analytics platform without tuning up our anchor platforms, we’d create more chaos than clarity. As Marie Kondo warned, that means we must confront our attachments and fears.

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Confronting Usefuless-ness

This 2019, assume that you have more platforms in your martech stack than you could possibly need. Rather than add to the clutter, subtract. Rather than replace platforms, tune up the ones you have. Rather than shop for more capabilities, maximize your untapped potential.

The stack, no matter how you map it, is an emotional creation. It is our tool chest, a story of our past attachments and future fears. It becomes “usefuless” when we neglect to question what we have and why.

Look, you don’t need to trade the house for a miniature cabin on a trailer. Appreciate and rediscover potential of everything in your tool set, then decide what’s superfluous. That is the cure to usefuless-ness. That is the power of mapping your stack.