Nearly 60% of CMOs report increased pressure from their CEOs to prove the impact of their marketing spend (Deloitte, CMO Survey 2021). Yet more than half of them also report that they are not thrilled with their marketing analytics. The modern marketing data stack is coming of age, taking its place alongside traditional MarTech to level up analytics and insights that teams can use to get the most from their marketing budgets while simultaneously improving CX.
Snowflake is in a unique position to observe how customers are using their MarTech stacks and the kinds of workloads that are running in the Data Cloud. We analyzed usage patterns from a pool of nearly 6,000 of our active customers, with existing on-demand or capacity contracts with Snowflake that generated revenue between June 1, 2021 to 2022, to understand what technologies they use for their marketing data stacks. We’ve shared those insights in this report, but here we dive into one of the most important use cases for the modern marketing data stack: analytics.
The research clarifies that in order to enact next-level analytics for better insight, you must first gain a unified view of your customer. Though this may sound simple, a 360-degree view of today’s customer is elusive for many marketers. We’ll discuss the reasons for these difficulties in a moment, but first, a bit more on what we mean by a unified (or 360) view.
The marketing leaders in our research who do have a unified view are all able to:
- Engage with live data in near real time without having to copy or move it.
- Easily share data both internally and externally without having to fight silos—everyone’s on the same page.
- Have a single source of truth which ingests data from every app in their MarTech stack.
- Access and share third-party data to enrich their data sets securely and in near real time.
Customer 360 is the foundation that you need to do any data-driven marketing. Once that foundation is in place, you can better drive attribution, personalization, and advanced machine learning (ML) use cases. When a company harnesses the power of a 360-customer view, they are able to perform next-gen transformational activities such as developing ML models to help the business better engage with the data. Many organizations begin to develop their own data apps to facilitate that engagement, even allowing data to be represented in persona-contextual ways, such as for the C-suite or even customers.
Bringing marketing together
You may be wondering, if the benefits of a 360-customer view are this obvious, why haven’t more marketers adopted it? One answer may be that the MarTech stack is a collection of disparate applications itself; some teams use more than 50 apps to perform functions from one end of the funnel to the other (Chief Martec.com) These may run in different places, from on-premises to cloud, and while many of the brands in the MarTech stack have robust integrations with critical and common applications such as CRM, few (if any) can address how data is handled across every app in the stack. Not only that, but most teams change up their MarTech stack at least occasionally—how many of the apps in your MarTech stack today were in place a year ago? Are any new ones under discussion? You get the idea.
Most marketing teams are in fact several teams, such as demand gen, social media, content, campaign management, and so on, and so “ownership” of different apps can lie across many teams, most of them passionate about what applications they use. This is why a cohesive analytics infrastructure can help bring cross-functional communication and execution to the next level.
Marketers need to capture first-, second-, and third-party event data from multiple sources through direct and indirect customer interactions. They rely on analytics solutions to process a diverse set of data analytics across behavioral, product, mobile, web, and other landscapes and make it available for storage in order to analyze and gain insights. Ideally, this storage occurs in one platform to serve as a single source of truth—this is the best way to gain insights into consumer behavior, campaign ROI, and other marketing need-to-knows.
A look at a modern MarTech stack
Compare Club, an online hub that allows consumers to shop and compare products such as car insurance, life insurance, car loans, or credit cards, has tapped the power of Snowflake as its marketing data stack to gain a unified view of the customer journey. The marketing data stack implemented by Compare Club now consists of analytics technologies, including Snowplow, which specializes in behavioral analytics.
Compare Club opted for Fivetran for fully managed reliable data integration for 90% of its data sources, including sales pipeline data from multiple Salesforce instances. That data then gets integrated into the Snowflake Data Cloud, which collects and consolidates all of Compare Club’s data, making it quick and easy to create data models and run analytics. Compare Club uses Hightouch to sync data from Snowflake to various tools such as Braze, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce to empower its sales and marketing teams, and increase return on ad spend. With Braze, Compare Club can launch marketing campaigns across multiple touchpoints to address every aspect of the customer journey. Finally, with Tableau, Compare Club uses an intuitive analytics platform to generate critical marketing and business insights from its data and campaigns.
This type of access to near real-time data is just one of the essential benefits enabled by a modern marketing data stack. Marketers today are expected to know the results of a campaign as it progresses, so data latency is not acceptable. Access to third-party data is critical for a 360-customer view, and providing the best, most personalized customer experience today requires insight into each customer’s behavior beyond direct interactions with your company. Until you truly have a unified view of the customer, attempts at conducting predictive analytics and behavioral modeling is just shooting in the dark.
We all know that (web) cookies may be crumbling and privacy regulations will keep evolving, so it is important that you begin collecting higher-quality data with your existing customer touchpoints. Marketers are increasingly adopting a single, centralized marketing data stack to give them the flexibility to adopt best-in-breed tools for each task from a wide array of choices, all optimized and working fluidly on the same platform. All of this combines to give companies the power to offer the best customer experience possible, which is essential to your success as a modern digital business.
To learn more, download our free report, The Modern Marketing Data Stack: Your Technology Guide to Unifying, Analyzing, and Activating the Data That Powers Amazing Customer Experiences.
Originally posted on January 18, 2023 @ 1:30 am
