Everything we do at Clevertouch is based on three guiding principles: Simplify, Connect & Inform.
We aim to simplify martech for our clients, helping them optimise their existing technology before we look at plugging gaps with new software.
Connect goes over and above integrations – as well as technology, it’s about connecting people and process.
We focus on how martech informs marketing and business decisions with data and insights, ensuring that marketing teams have information at their fingertips for quick, tactical changes whilst the entire business can make bigger decisions with integrated data and relevant dashboards. It helps to clarify the role of martech within the bigger picture.
The marketing technology ‘stack’ is a well-known and widely adopted term used to address the collection of software, tools and platforms marketers use to execute and manage marketing activity across different channels. However, we felt that referencing technologies within a stack ignores their capability to form one unified working system designed to connect and compliment each other. Enter, the Martech Spine.
We believe that Simplicity is key, not complexity, and certainly not Stacks.
The concept of the Martech Spine was born in 2016 to help organisations better visualise and simplify the way in which their core marketing technologies are connected, better informing stakeholders on marketing performance and value.
The Evolution of the Spine
Back in 2016, the marketing technology landscape was less cluttered than it is today. The first iteration of The Martech Spine© served a specific purpose: to visualise the connection between key marketing technologies and to better understand which of those technologies were fundamental to marketing performance. Typically this included Content Management Systems (CMS), Marketing Automation (MA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), before organisations could look at adding arterial technologies such as event, content and webinar tools.
Fast forward to today and the marketing technology landscape has become somewhat overwhelming, not least by the significant rise of AI agents and applications over the last two years. Some martech vendor infographics now contain over 15,000 martech vendors, making key platform and technology choices difficult for key stakeholders. Whilst the core technologies of the Martech Spine for any given organisation may have changed over last nine years, the core principles of it remain the same. Today at Clevertouch we continue use it as our basis for helping organisations of any size transform their marketing operations to drive revenue and growth.
Your job as a CMO is to connect the important technologies that make up the Spine, ensuring that first-clicks to end-customers can be tracked for better insight and forward-thinking predictability
Over time it has become apparent to us that technology vendors are moving laterally between platforms and technologies, combining their features for better marketing capability. The traditional Spine is no longer as relevant in the market, particularly at enterprise-level. If one or more platforms, or even business processes, are efficiently combining core martech capabilities, then the Spine can be established, enabling the business to create a roadmap to further utilise those, or to adopt centralised technology with more confidence. Equally if there are gaps in capabilities, then roadmap activity can prioritise filling those first.
The Martech Spine© in 2025
Whilst iterations of The Martech Spine since 2016 have evolved in-line with new and emerging technology such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Business Intelligence (BI) and Sales Enablement. This year’s spine focuses on the capabilities of the technology you use.
Moving away from the underlying technology and focusing on platform capabilities helps to untangle the complicated web that is martech. Enterprise environments normally involve more than one platform in a technology category and the previous view of the spine would almost always imply that you should only have one. Architecturally, that is correct and wise, but the reality of many organisations is that more than one platform is required to cope with business demand or global region requirements.
If you think about a ‘capability’ on the other hand, this could be a concept that applies to multiple platforms working together to deliver it. This is how modern businesses actually work. When we audit a business and it’s technology, we assess which platforms are working in harmony to deliver a Spine capability, a far more impactful mechanism. This is where synergies across marketing and sales technologies will be highlighted and where transformation efforts need to be applied to gain traction on business goals.
The underlying strategy is to deliver the capability with all your tools, not just one.
Marketing Technology Capabilities
To build the Spine in 2025 you need to know what the core martech capabilities are, the typical technologies that relate to them and crucially, why focusing on that capability should enable your business to unlock.
Business Insights & Modelling
The ‘brain’ of the operations and top of the spine, receiving input from everything below it, the ‘body’. With smart data platforms, more AI, and more data enabled skills in the market, it’s no surprise that businesses have never been more aware. This capability should unlock deep insights across all business sources, internal and even external stakeholders. Technology up here falls in the categories of data, Snowflake, for example, analytics and business information (i.e. Tableau or Power BI). Importantly though, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) could help create the capability, but really, they fall into the next category.
Identity Resolutions & Customer 360
An extension of the ‘brain’, this part needs to piece together multiple sources of information related to the customer base. The more integrated the business data is, the richer the view of the customer. For communication strategies this means better quality customer campaigns that enable them to receive more relevant communications tailored to their needs. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) such as Salesforce Data Cloud, Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, Microsoft’s Dynamics Customer Insights, and digital first technologies like Adobe’s Experience Platform & Audience Manager, or Salesforce’s Experience Cloud can create this.
Strategic Resource Management
Another extension of the ‘brain’ but more internal to an organisation, strategic resource management could also be likened to the ‘veins’ or ‘nerves’ of the business. Planning for internal and external marketing resources is no longer an afterthought. It’s where ideas come to life, where marketers and salespeople can review the Customer 360 dashboards, understand what the market needs and plan initiatives to go to market. It’s where budgets are split, directed and most importantly for business leaders - it’s where large marketing budgets can be monitored, controlled and understood. This capability should feed structure and outputs back into the ‘brain’ and aid in Business Insights, helping with logical business models. Platforms like Jira, Adobe’s Workfront, Slack or Monday.com are great examples, but there is a vast array of platforms that come together to provide strategic control of resources.
Journey Orchestration & Decision-making
Getting into the ‘bones’ of marketing now, journey orchestration is where core marketing technology comes into its own. Working hand-in-hand with the customer 360 capability, feeding off the rich centralised activity and behaviours to create always-on sets of communication or one-off journeys across multiple channels. Journey Orchestration at this level may be purely visual for organisations without channel activation or integrating their channels and executing along the customer journey across on and offline channels. Making decisions based on engagement, behaviours or external market factors are all possible within the capability. Platforms that fall into this involve some functionality from CDPs and interfaces from vendors like Adobe with their two different Journey Orchestration tools, AJO and AJOB2B, or Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, for example.
Channel Activation
There is a lot of consultative debate on keeping the channel activation capability separate from the orchestration category, especially when we are controversially positioning traditional Marketing Automation tools like HubSpot, Adobe’s Marketo Engage or Salesforce Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) in this category. It’s controversial because these tools do have some cross over, no doubt. But the power of the 360 view of the customer and its almost unlimited centralised learning of everything to do with a customer is what drives Orchestration platforms. Channels are about execution and results. We think this year’s Spine should reflect what the vendors are doing and how businesses are using marketing technology.
Relationship Management
This category would have previously been identified as the CRM technology component of the spine, however, now customer relationships are managed by a raft of technologies – dedicated customer service platforms, chat bots, IT help desks and customer web portals to name a few. This is mirrored by the vendors too. Salesforce and Microsoft are building on the framework of a core CRM that broadens into industry-specific tooling. Capabilities here should work hand-in-hand with journey orchestration and channel activation. The most successful organisations that manage relationships well have no barriers between their ‘front office’ (Customer facing teams) and ‘shop floor’ (Marketing).
Enablement
Enablement provides us with another interesting capability with many different lenses, one of those being a sales outreach enabling sales teams to speak to customers with deeper understanding of their needs and behaviours. Enablement, when thinking about internal tools, is about Learning and Development (L&D) platforms where training material and videos can be hosted to help gain consistency across the organisation. Externally it could involve the personalisation of sales collateral highlight what may be going on in the customers world at a one-to-one level. Platforms here are, again, very vast in nature but think of L&D tools like Docebo, TalentLMS, and Adobe Learning Manager.
Where Next?
We hope that has given you a flavour of the new Martech Capabilities Spine. The important take away here is that a capability may utilise platform or many platforms working together.
…but ultimately, it’s not the platforms that matter here, it’s that your business has the right capabilities to be successful - even if that means leveraging a powerful spreadsheet over a piece of technology
Clevertouch is a martech consultancy that can help organisations with unpicking the complicated web of martech stacks, helping you to underpin a core set of capabilities to drive success. We would love to hear about where you think your capabilities are, and for some guidance on how to build a Martech Spine for your business, you can book some time with us directly by filling out the contact form, here.
And if designing and building your Spine feels like a task too big for you right now, we encourage you to take the martechIQ assessment to analyse your organisation's martech performance and benchmark against your peers and other organisations. The analysis of your score across different martech categories will help you to identify where and how you can make incremental improvement with the way in which you utilise, integrate and prove marketing performance. Take the assessment and learn more, here.
