The Impossible Knot -- Getting Marketing & Data to Talk

These are questions that cloud data warehouses were invented to help answer, and no previous pattern for resolving them comes remotely close to being more effective.

This technology's stunning adoption rate and overall category growth bears out the cloud data warehouse's power.

So, you’ve got a sword - but can you use it to cut a knot without cutting yourself? That’s where data teams come in.

First, we should acknowledge that data teams and marketing teams don't necessarily work all that well together.

This happens every. single. day.

This exchange is not only real but a perfect encapsulation of how most companies struggle to gather and use customer data to fuel growth. Everyone is well-intentioned, but the outcome is wildly unproductive and wasteful. Another company tangled in the gordian knot.

It doesn't have to be this way. The truth is that there is nobody in a better position to help deliver customer data to front-line marketers than the actual data organization. The data team has all the necessary skills to gather, clean, organize, and analyze customer data.

It's their literal job to know things about customer behavior - this means they're very likely already preparing the data to build dashboards and study experiments across an organization.

Today, at most organizations, an analytics team knows precisely how to answer all the most exciting questions marketers have. But most of that knowledge either goes nowhere, finds its way into a dashboard, or manifests as a weekly emailed report.

Is it really such a leap to go from preparing data for dashboards to using the nearly exact same data to help marketers execute programs?

I’ve Got a Sword and I’ve Met Alexander. What Now?

Marketing and data leaders at many organizations are partnering to adopt a new hub-and-spoke data architecture dubbed the "Composable CDP" that puts the cloud data warehouse at the center of the organization to solve their customer data problems.

With a Composable CDP, the data team stores and models all customer data once in a cloud data warehouse. This store of customer data is then made readily available for both analytics and marketing purposes alike to ensure the organization is working off of one central source of truth.

The Composable CDP

With this architecture, the data team is tasked with providing analytical clarity to their business partners. Their job is to ensure the central source of truth is full of rich data about the business and valuable models that help identify growth opportunities.

Meanwhile, marketers can't work out of the warehouse directly. Marketers are at home in e-mail tools and ad platforms. They identify placements for videos or plan huge-scale direct mail campaigns. The connective tissue between the source of truth and these end-points is called Data Activation.

Data Activation can be done sub-optimally with custom pipelines and spreadsheets or much more efficiently with Data Activation platforms like Hightouch that connect directly from the data warehouse to hundreds of tools where marketers work. But regardless, the knot isn't truly gone until marketers are actually able to do something with the valuable insights in the data warehouse.

This end-to-end paradigm of a Composable CDP is a very different way of thinking about the world. Still, a comparatively easy one to embrace since almost all of its components are already in place. It offers substantially more flexibility, security, and ownership over data - all at a fraction of the cost of its legacy alternatives. Rather than operating in silos, organizations can capitalize on their existing cloud investments to solve each (seemingly impossible) customer data problem at hand.

Looking Ahead

The next few years will be very interesting in board rooms around the world. Certain companies will solve the collaboration problem between data teams and business teams. They will learn to harness the flexibility and power of their cloud data warehouse for customer data problems and use those powers to differentiate and drive growth.

Others will keep trudging up to the same old knot and the same old technique for untying it and wonder what they're doing wrong.

In time we'll all come to see that there's a better, more straightforward way to solve this problem that's bedeviled us for far too long.

Onwards.

Tejas