How Leaders of the Modern Marketing Data Stack Differentiate Themselves in a Crowded Market

The marketing technology landscape has exploded in the last decade. With over 11,000 available solutions, an increase of 7,258% over the last 12 years, marketing organizations have never had more tool options to choose from. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at how leading vendors in the 2023 Modern Marketing Data Stack are differentiating their products in a crowded market.

As of 2019, the average enterprise used 120 marketing applications. That was a lot of applications at the time of the report, and today’s companies likely use even more—a trend that will only increase as AI adoption accelerates.

When it comes to using these technologies together—specifically, managing data across them—marketing organizations unfortunately face a significant hurdle. In a traditional SaaS product, the provider stores and processes the data used within the application in their own data platform. As a result, those 120 marketing applications become 120 potential data silos, which require exporting, uploading and stitching together to create a holistic view of one’s customers and campaigns. 

This traditional approach creates several challenges: 

• Rising operational costs to export, upload and maintain data across applications 
• Revenue loss because teams aren’t able to personalize or optimize their programs without a holistic view of the customer or campaign 
• A poor data foundation that stunts adoption and creation of advanced data products like generative AI
• Increase in privacy and security risks from data being copied to many applications
• A poor customer experience due to data latency across systems
• Lengthy procurement times because the solutions require exposing customer data, the details of which must be thoroughly scrutinized before an organization can adopt a new martech tool 

Leaders across the Modern Marketing Data Stack are responding to these challenges and differentiating their products by giving brands more access to and control of data. Let’s take a look at three methods frequently used by leaders in the Modern Marketing Data Stack to ensure that there is a single copy of data, the data is up-to-date, and the brand has more control of its data: 

• Sharing live, ready-to-query data with the brand
• Storing and processing data in the brand’s Snowflake account
• Running an entire app within the brand’s Snowflake account

Leading platforms ranging from Adobe Campaign to Braze to Zeta Global use Snowflake to deliver powerful analytical experiences within their products. The data driving the provider’s application is stored and processed in the provider’s own Snowflake account. Snowflake’s multi-cluster architecture, separation of storage and compute, and support for structured, semi-structured and unstructured data allow these technologies to scale seamlessly without worrying about concurrency limits or costly overprovisioning of resources. 

Beyond delivering powerful analytical experiences, providers differentiate their products by offering live, ready-to-query data to their customers through the Snowflake Data Cloud. No ETL, FTP, or APIs are required. Brands can easily utilize this data alongside their other data within their Snowflake accounts. And in reverse, they can share live data with their martech vendors, without any exporting or uploading. 

Modern Marketing Data Stack companies with managed applications offering live, ready-to-query data on Snowflake include the following: Acquia, Braze, Crisp, Comscore, Data.ai, Funnel, Heap, Habu, Hubspot, Iterable, IQVIA, Merkury by Merkle, NCSolutions, Nielsen, Piano, Simon Data, The Trade Desk, VideoAmp, and Zeta. 

For some marketing organizations, access to live, ready-to-query data isn’t enough. They’d prefer to maintain control of their customer data and instead give apps permission to access it. In response to this requirement, many leaders in the Modern Marketing Data Stack use the data in a brand’s Snowflake account as the source of truth for the customer record.

For example, MessageGears’ customer engagement platform connects to a brand’s Snowflake account to store and process data to run email campaigns. In doing so, the brand maintains complete control of its data because it never leaves Snowflake, and they can rest assured that campaigns are executing on the freshest customer data. 

In this case study, OpenTable, a joint customer of Snowflake and MessageGears, shared that by using MessageGears’ product it: 

• Heavily reduced costs and improved ROI because there was less need to copy and ship data to external vendors
• Enhanced personalization with faster access to higher-quality data
• Accelerated campaigns by days by cutting out ETL and data processing
• Reduced team frustration because they no longer need to work on broken data feeds or syncs

With data stored and processed in a brand’s Snowflake account, martech solutions both improve their margins and accelerate procurement timelines because the brand doesn’t need to export sensitive customer data to the provider’s systems. 

Leaders and ones to watch in the Modern Marketing Data Stack that connect into brands’ Snowflake accounts as connected apps include Amplitude, Census, GrowthLoop, Hightouch, MessageGears, RudderStack, Simon Data, Snowplow, and Twilio Segment. 

For many brands, sharing access to data with third parties, even if the data resides within their data platform, presents security and data governance concerns that can take months to overcome or prevent an organization from adopting the technology. 

At Snowflake Summit in June 2023, Snowflake launched Snowflake Native Apps in public preview on AWS to address these vendor and brand challenges. (The Snowflake Native App Framework on Google Cloud and Azure is currently in private preview.)

Brands can discover and purchase Snowflake Native Apps on Snowflake Marketplace, then install and run them entirely within their own Snowflake account. The brand grants the app access to data within their Snowflake account, but there is no need to provide direct access to the vendor. This reduces security and procurement hurdles and helps accelerate time to value.

Providers benefit from monetization and distribution across the Data Cloud, secured IP, improved margins, and accelerated procurement cycles. 

Leaders and ones to watch in the Modern Marketing Data Stack are already offering Snowflake Native Apps on Snowflake Marketplace. For instance, IdentityQA from Simon Data validates companies’ identity models, while Bond Synapse XI from Bond Brand Loyalty offers marketers a way to optimize and benchmark their loyalty programs. 

This is only the start of Snowflake Native Apps. With support for Snowpark Container Services (currently in private preview), app builders can distribute and deploy even more sophisticated applications and large language models (LLMs) in brands’ Snowflake accounts. Amplitude’s Snowflake Native App, currently in development, is one such example. 

Likewise, Snowpark Container Services used within a Snowflake Native App gives marketing organizations a secure way to tap into cutting-edge generative AI models. An LLM can be installed as a Snowflake Native App. Because the LLM runs inside the brand’s account as a Snowflake Native App, enterprise data used for fine-tuning is never exposed to the provider. Check out a demo from Snowflake Summit. 

Leaders and ones to watch in the Modern Marketing Data Stack building or already offering Snowflake Native Apps include Aidentified, Braze, Bond, FullContact, Habu, Hex, Informatica, LiveRamp, Matillion, Neustar, Samooha, Simon Data, and Zeta.  

Companies across the Modern Marketing Data Stack are differentiating their offerings by meeting their customers where their data is. Over the next five years, those 120+ applications used on average by a marketing organization will run on a common core of customer data, creating better outcomes for vendors, brands and their customers. 

Snowflake’s ambition is to provide the ecosystem with the richest set of capabilities to enable this bold and exciting trend.

To learn more about trends in the modern marketing data landscape and view the full list of leaders and ones to watch, check out the 2023 Modern Marketing Data Stack. 

If you’re interested in building a marketing product on Snowflake, join Powered by Snowflake, a free program to help you develop, scale and operate your application.