Today’s marketers have a wealth of data available, enabling them to improve targeting, fine-tune messaging, and optimize spend. A strategic marketing stack helps teams make the best use of that data. Let’s explore the most important components of the martech stack, its core competencies, and how a data platform can skyrocket marketing and advertising effectiveness.
Core Capabilities of a Marketing Data Stack
A marketing data stack enables teams to improve conversion rates, boost ROI, and increase customer loyalty. Here are six capabilities of modern stacks that empower organizations to accomplish this.
Integration and modeling
Before it can be deployed for analytics and other purposes, data must be cleaned, organized, and made accessible. Data integration solutions transform data to make it useful to humans and computers.
Identity and enrichment
To create a truly personalized marketing experience, an organization must map each touchpoint and interaction and enrich those identities using third-party data, often purchased from a third-party data marketplace or exchanged via a data clean room.
Analytics
Capturing data from first-, second-, and third-party sources through direct and indirect customer interactions allows teams to better understand the customer journey. Analytics tools process a diverse set of data across behavioral, product, mobile, web, and other landscapes to produce insights.
Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) empowers organizations to better understand their audiences, identify meaningful trends in customer behavior, and accurately measure the effectiveness of multi-channel marketing efforts across all channels.
Activation and measurement
The end goal of the martech stack is to use marketing data to drive growth. Data activation allows marketers to take action on organized data. Measurement tools specialize in offering organizations visibility and feedback, providing critical information about the performance and effectiveness of their marketing and advertising campaigns.
Data science and artificial intelligence
Applying AI to marketing can enable brands and partners to analyze and use much larger pools of data. AI and ML solutions enhance data-driven marketing, providing more granular insights from data and improving forecasting or segmentation precision. In addition, these platforms help data scientists and analysts build and deploy high-quality models for automating, assuring, and accelerating predictive analytics and automating decision engines.
The Role of the Data Platform in the Martech Stack
With their cloud-native architecture and on-demand scalability, data platforms play an important role in supporting the modern martech stack.
Unify marketing data from across the entire stack
Cloud data platforms provide a single source of truth for the entire marketing data stack to work from. By eliminating data silos, all marketing-relevant data is available in one easy-to-access location.
Build audience segments
With all marketing data stored in one place, teams can quickly build audience segments based on custom criteria such as customer information, demographics, household income, past browsing behavior, purchasing information, location, and device.
Develop a Customer 360-view of marketing behavior and performance
The Customer 360-view brings together every interaction and touchpoint from a website inquiry to a product purchase to a customer support ticket. A cloud data platform makes this possible, uniting data from disparate sources together to provide each customer with a truly personalized shopping experience.
Scalable compute power
The flexibility to scale compute power up, down, or out allows marketing departments to grow organically over time, without the need for costly and disruptive on-premises hardware upgrades. With elastic, on-demand compute power, a cloud data platform can easily handle spikes in demand during intensive use such as events or holidays.
Support for both structured and semi-structured data
Cloud data platforms support structured and semi-structured data, permitting marketers to easily leverage all their marketing data.
Easy integration with BI and analytics tools
Analytics and BI tools can be quickly integrated into the cloud data platform, helping organizations conduct powerful analyses on their marketing data.
Key Components of the Martech Stack
Marketing technology stacks are often a mix of solutions tailored to varied business requirements. Each is a custom blend of tools tailored to support the unique needs of an individual team working toward a company’s goals and objectives. With the right data platform to glean actionable insights, the following Martech stack components are considered foundational for most modern B2B and B2C marketing organizations.
Email marketing
Marketers use email marketing software to manage their email campaigns, creating, testing, sending, and optimizing campaigns. These platforms have advanced features for creating automated customer journeys, delivering personalized marketing messages, and generating reports for assessing the effectiveness of each campaign. Many email marketing tools are part of an all-in-one marketing solution.
Content management
Because content is foundational to marketing, every martech stack requires a content management system to help teams create, manage, and modify content published online. A content management system is a browser-based tool that allows those without coding experience to collaborate on and manage their own web content.
SEO tools
Search engine optimization (SEO) tools help marketers drive qualified organic and paid traffic to their websites. SEO tools uncover much more than simply what popular search terms are being used and how difficult it will be to rank for them. Using advanced analytics artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), modern SEO tools are capable of analyzing internet search queries for a broad range of implicit intent signals. By developing a deeper understanding of how, when, and where people search, marketing teams make better choices about how to engage prospects and customers.
Automation software
Most marketing platforms provide some level of automation for email marketing, landing page creation, and lead management including capture, scoring, and nurturing. Many automation software providers also offer advanced features such as AI and ML-enabled features for suggesting target audiences and optimizing messaging, dynamic content generation, and social media integrations.
Mobile marketing tools
Mobile marketing tools allow marketers, particularly in B2C organizations, to create campaigns that reach customers on their mobile devices, usually their smartphones. This critical component of the martech stack facilitates proximity, location-based, and mobile app marketing initiatives. Mobile marketing tools also facilitate the generation and placement of quick response (QR) codes and advertising using short message service (SMS) messaging and multimedia messaging services (MMS) .
Data platform
The customer data platform (CDP) aggregates customer data across the martech stack, providing a single place to store all relevant marketing data. The CDP normalizes the data and constructs unique profiles for each customer, enabling marketing teams to create highly personalized marketing campaigns and relevant offers.
Analytics and AI-powered technology
Marketing has become an increasingly data-intensive discipline. But with so much data available, making relevant connections has become more difficult. Data analytics and AI are two essential and often interconnected capabilities of the marketing stack. Marketing analytics tools augmented with AI help marketers understand the actions required to achieve their goals
Build Your Marketing Technology Stack with Snowflake
The Snowflake Data Cloud enables marketers to improve the effectiveness of their martech data stack. With full elasticity, Snowflake’s storage and compute resources can be scaled rapidly to meet demand spikes such as events or holiday season commerce. Snowflake provides support for both structured and semi-structured data sets, made accessible in an easy-to-query SQL format, giving teams access to the full breadth and depth of customer data to improve decision-making. Snowflake helps marketers build and leverage a modern marketing data stack to derive insights from the near-endless data marketing efforts generate.
As the size of the average martech stack size continues to grow, the ability to aggregate, mine, and share all that rich data is essential. Snowflake works with leading BI and analytics partners to give marketing analysts and marketing ops professionals access to a full range of powerful analysis tools to better understand their customers’ needs.