Marketing Data Stack — The Future of Marketing Analytics
Do you know you may not be gaining even half of the value from the high volume of marketing data you are capturing? There could be countless valuable insights and opportunities hidden in your data.
It’s because Marketing Analytics still has not attained its ultimate potential. As per CMO Survey, most of the top marketers have rated the impact of marketing analytics on a company’s performance as average i.e. 4.1 on the scale of 7. This scale is much lower for B2B companies.
As per the HBR article, one of the major reasons is data challenge, where data captured from different platforms are in silos. Data is not unified and transformed into a consistent format and stored in a centralized location. As per a study, an average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud services and platforms. Each of these platforms captures high-value data within its scope. Mostly, all this data is analyzed in silos, limiting the insights one can derive from this data.
Another key issue is the analytical tools we use for marketing analysis. These platforms limit the analysis and reporting to their respective format like Facebook Ads, Google Analytics have their fixed structure. We cannot perform deep analysis and run SQL queries on them.
So, the question is how can we get out of this state and leverage the complete capabilities of the data we are capturing. The key is to unify the data and run analysis on the unified data. It’s possible by setting up relevant data tools for the marketing department, i.e. what we call a ‘Marketing Data Stack’.
What is Marketing Data Stack
Marketing Data Stack is a set of cloud-based data tools that a marketing department can set up to capture, transform, store, and analyze the complete marketing data.
Marketing Data Stack empowers marketing departments to achieve any level of analysis on complete marketing data, including historical data, thus uncovering new insights and opportunities.
Setting up such specialized data technology for the marketing department was impossible a few years ago. Traditional tools were expensive, required extensive technical knowledge, and the setup process was long.
With the emergence of cloud-based technology and no-code platforms, the barrier to adopt these tools has become very low. Now, these tools are very easy to set up and scale, affordable, and need very low technical knowledge.
Components of Marketing Data Stack
A marketing data stack comprises 5 key components,
- Marketing Data Sources
- Marketing Data Pipeline
- Marketing Data Warehouse
- Business Intelligence Tool
- Marketing Data Sync Tool
Marketing Data Sources
As we discussed, an average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud services. Each of these platforms captures its own set of data. Data Sources are a combination of all these services that marketers use and want to capture and store the data from.
With Marketing Data Stack, you can capture data from all your marketing platforms, store it in a centralized location, and run analysis on it.
These platforms can belong to any category. Following are a few common categories,
- Advertising Platforms — Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Twitter Ads
- Analytics Platforms — Google Analytics, Mix Panel
- Marketing Automation — Hubspot, Mailchimp
- Sales CRM — Salesforce, Hubspot
- E-Commerce — Shopify, WooCommerce
- Support — Zen Desk, Fresh Desk
Marketing Data Pipeline
Marketing Data Pipeline captures data from a marketing data source and loads the data into a database or data warehouse.
In earlier days, companies used to build in-house data pipelines to capture data from each source. If you are using 12 marketing platforms, then you would need to build pipelines for all those 12 platforms. This used to be a costly and time-consuming task.
But, now we have modern cloud-based marketing data pipeline tools that offer pre-built integrations for all the sources. Most of these tools are no-code platforms that marketers can use and are affordable.
A few of the pre-built data pipeline tools that you can explore for marketing are Hevo Data, Supermetrics, and Funnel. These tools are very easy to set up. You can start capturing data from all your marketing sources in minutes.
While selecting a marketing data pipeline tool, there are 2 important things you need to consider. One, does it have pre-built integrations available for all your marketing platforms? Second, is it integrated with your data warehouse?
Marketing Data Warehouse
The key to leverage the power of all the data collected is to set up a Marketing Data Warehouse.
Data Warehouses are modern data storage platforms that are optimized for analysis and query processing.
A Marketing Data Warehouse stores all the marketing data in one place. It centralizes the data and maintains a single source of truth for the marketing team. Centralizing the data is essential to gain rich insights.
Cloud-based data warehouses are easy to use and affordable. You only pay as per data size and query processing. A few popular data warehouses in the market are Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Firebolt, and Amazon Redshift.
You can also explore marketing data pipeline tools that provide automated data warehouse management. It eases the pressure on the marketing team to manage and scale the data warehouse. It helps a non-technical user to set up a marketing data warehouse.
A few data pipeline tools like Hevo Data and Panoply provide automated data warehouse management.
The key factors you need to consider while evaluating a marketing data warehouse are speed, cost, scalability, and security.
Business Intelligence Tool
This is where the actual fun happens. You get to play around and make use of your centralized marketing data.
Business Intelligence tools let you run complex analyses on the complete marketing data and visualize data in various formats. They connect to your marketing data warehouse and leverage all the marketing data.
It enables you to uncover rich insights, automate marketing reporting, and spot new trends and opportunities.
A few sample use cases,
- Discover the best-performing channel for a specific region, campaign, or ad set by analyzing combined data from all your ad platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and others.
- Assess your content marketing strategy by analyzing combined data of your Web Analytics tool and SEO Tool.
- Automate the marketing reporting by building dashboards on BI tools.
- Build dashboards for different teams or users. Like, an overview report for the top management, a multi-channel report for the performance marketing team, Social Media Dashboard for the social media team.
It fastens your decision-making as all your data is analytics-ready and accessible to you in near real-time. While deciding, you can uncover data on questions you have or insights you need.
The most common BI tools in the market are Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau. These tools are easy to use, most marketing analysts have the skill to work on these tools. Even for a digital marketer, it’s easy to adapt to these tools.
Marketing Data Sync Tool
A key gap in the sales and marketing team is that the sales team does not have real-time access to a 360-degree view of each customer. Thus, affecting the sales productivity and performance.
Sales representatives and account managers would prefer the complete details of the customer on their CRM. It’s good to have details on marketing interaction, product usage, or customer support. This will help them have a meaningful conversation, thus increasing retention and activation.
Reverse ETL tools can achieve it. In the space of marketing, we call these tools Marketing Data Sync Tool. These tools collect all the data stored in a marketing data warehouse for each customer and add it into CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot, or other marketing platforms.
Data from your customer support software like Zendesk, Email Marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Product analysis tools like Amplitude can be added to the CRM for each customer.
The most used tools are Census, Hightouch, and Hevo Activate. While selecting a Marketing Data Sync tool, check if it’s compatible with your CRM and marketing data warehouse.
Build your Marketing Data Stack and Leverage the Complete Power of Marketing Platforms and Data.
Remember, you don’t need help from your tech or data team; you can take complete control of marketing data.
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