Modern Marketing Data Stack: Best Practices from Analyzing Snowflake's Customer Base

Are you efficiently unifying, modeling, analyzing, and activating all the data you need to drive impactful marketing campaigns and customer experiences? 

For years, marketing teams have struggled to operate from a single view of the customer and their business, essential to powering personalized experiences and measuring impact on key KPIs such as sales, growth, and profitability. Today, only half of all marketers have a unified view of the customer. And about the same percentage of marketing leaders are unimpressed by the results they receive from their investment in analytics.

Leading organizations are building modern data stacks on the Data Cloud to deliver on the promise of data-driven marketing. To help identify best practices for developing a modern marketing data stack, Snowflake started with all of the companies that are active members of the Snowflake Partner Network (or ones with a comparable agreement in place with Snowflake), as well as Snowflake Marketplace providers, and analyzed usage patterns for those companies from nearly 6,000 of our active customers with existing on-demand or capacity Snowflake contracts that generated revenue between June 1, 2021, to June 1, 2022. The analysis revealed how businesses are assembling their marketing data stacks and which solutions are the most common. These organizations use the Snowflake Data Cloud, alongside their martech tools, as the foundation for their modern marketing data stack, giving Snowflake a unique vantage point to assess their use of complementary marketing technologies.The result is our report, The Modern Marketing Data Stack: Your Technology Guide to Unifying, Analyzing, and Activating the Data That Powers Amazing Customer Experiences.

Here are some highlights from our findings:

• The most sophisticated marketers power their marketing data stacks by employing a best-of-breed approach instead of building their own solutions from scratch. More than 500 of the Snowflake customers¹ analyzed in this report appear in the 2022 Forbes Global 2000. A whopping 95.2% use at least one of the tools highlighted in our report, while an equally impressive 71% use three or more².

• We observed there are typically six groups of capabilities organizations invest in when building their marketing data stacks:
  • 1. Analytics
  • 2. Integration and modeling
  • 3. Identity and enrichment
  • 4. Activation and measurement
  • 5. Business intelligence
  • 6. Data science and machine learning

Of course, organizations are in different phases of implementing their data-driven marketing strategy. Some may find themselves early in their journey, currently building a strong foundation by integrating all business and customer data into a single view. Others have matured to the phase of being able to activate that data, execute cross-channel attribution and measurement, and apply data science tools to support automation at scale for marketing use-cases. 

• Snowflake Marketplace helps marketers share data to improve their analytical insights. Twenty percent of Snowflake customers have at least one stable edge, a measure of durable, value-additive data collaboration. Specifically, an “edge” is a data share between a Snowflake customer and a data provider while a “stable edge” is a consistent data-sharing connection producing at least 20 transactions in which compute resources are consumed. 

• Marketers that enrich their first-party data with third-party datasets can achieve deeper marketing insights. As of June 2022, the most frequently used consumer data sets in Snowflake Marketplace over the previous 12 months were in the categories of weather, financial, health, energy, transportation, demographics, and commerce. Our report has a full listing of the specific partners and datasets.

• Identity providers are an important element of the modern marketing data stack. Organizations require an effective process to attribute customer behavior and interactions, across all touchpoints, to a single unified customer profile. Many leading identity resolution providers have natively integrated with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Essentially, this means there is no need to copy and move data between any of these solutions and the Data Cloud, adding agility and governance while reducing latency. 

Access the full report here to see a complete list of top providers delivering on each capability of the modern marketing data stack.

1 As of July 31, 2022. Please see Snowflake’s Q2 FY23 earnings press release for a definition of total customers.

2 Snowflake internal data, 2022.