Marketing Analytics: The Foundation of a Data-Driven Business
Marketing analytics is the combined processes CMOs and other marketing professionals use to measure marketing program success and value. With the growth of online marketing and steady evolution of the MarTech stack, marketing data now come from a wide range of sources and platforms. Marketing’s role has expanded well beyond what organizations previously required. Media fragmentation has been a challenge since the launch of cable television, when brands could no longer reach the majority of consumers on just three channels. The proliferation of content has only accelerated with the emergence of apps, streaming on-demand services such as Netflix and Hulu, and the mobile web, making it harder to reach and engage consumers. With so many new sources of data, marketing orgs are now on the front lines of corporate tech. From software choices to data storage and tool selection, marketing has taken on much of the role of the traditional IT function. It is now normal for even small marketing teams at SMEs to regularly access more than a dozen applications to execute digital campaigns.
To produce useful and actionable data, all these sources and platforms need to be unified into a single view that can act as a single source of truth for data. From this central view, BI and analytics tools can help marketing teams drill down into details at the aggregate, source, channel, campaign, asset, or customer level to see not just the data but also trends, insights, and opportunities. Given the costs involved in marketing campaigns, businesses need reliable analytics to determine program ROI and overall effectiveness.Teams then use the analytics to determine how their marketing initiatives are performing and to identify opportunities for improvement.
Marketing Analytics Benefits
In addition to helping marketers evaluate their campaigns and pro-actively plan for successive quarters, a strong marketing analytics toolset also makes it much easier to show progress and value to the broader C-Suite. Data points alone are often not enough to show value to executive leadership. Strong analytics capabilities allow teams to tell a story that justifies earlier decisions, budgets, and future plans. They can also help marketers forecast performance, which is of high value to other business teams, particularly sales organizations.
Snowflake and Cloud Marketing Analytics
In response to the significant changes mentioned above, forward-thinking marketers are already starting to address the challenge of unifying multiple datastreams by moving their data to the cloud. Conventional data warehousing solutions were not built to address the complexity, volume, variety, and frequency of data that is constantly generated today. For marketers, the advantages of a cloud data platform include:
Unified Data Sets - A cloud data platform provides a centralized location to unify access (in real time) disparate data, along with the centralized computing power needed to do so.
Unified Reporting - With all data combined in one cloud-based architecture, it can be analyzed and viewed holistically in the moment, instead of after the fact.
Easier Management - Keeping all data on one cloud data platform means faster queries and retrievals and infinite capacity to avoid overloads and slowdowns.
Seamless Sharing - Sharing is also easier when data is stored on a cloud data platform. There is no need to download, compress, and transfer data peer-to-peer via FTP, email, or file sharing software, each of which has significant limitations.
Lower Costs - Lastly, a cloud data platform allows you to scale up or down without long-term contract commitments.You can use the data storage you need, without worrying about capacity constraints or paying for what you don’t need at the moment.
The need to consolidate data for an omnichannel or Customer 360 view is the foundation of successful marketing campaigns. Snowflake’s platform overcomes this challenge by collecting and analyzing all customer data, collapsing data silos and enabling timely, relevant, personalized, and timely offers. Whether as essentially infrastructure for a customer data platform or the foundation of a BI-driven marketing analytics platform, a cloud data platform can help marketers move quickly from intuition to data-driven validation.
To read more about marketing analytics, download the eBook, "Master Your Role as CM(I)O."
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