Snowflake, the Data Cloud company has announced the findings of an in-depth analysis of how companies are building their marketing data infrastructures. “The Modern Marketing Data Stack” report is based on a study of the most common solutions Snowflake customers have in place to integrate, transform, and activate data to drive superior customer experiences and business results.
The analysis reveals what capabilities define the Modern Marketing Data Stack, the combination of solutions helping organisations overcome data silos and operate from a single source of truth. As a result, marketing teams can use their analytics budget more wisely, deliver enhanced customer experiences, reveal new data insights, drive more business, and demonstrate significant value to executive management companies. As these companies are using the Snowflake Data Cloud as their foundation, Snowflake has a unique vantage point to understand which solutions are the most well adopted and utilised.
“For years, marketing teams have struggled to operate from a single view of the customer and their business, essential to powering personalised experiences and measuring impact on key KPIs such as sales, growth, and profitability,” said Snowflake Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Persson. “Today, leading organisations are using a number of tools and building modern data stacks on the Data Cloud to deliver on the promise of data-driven marketing.”
The report found that the most sophisticated marketers are powering their marketing data stacks by employing a best-of-breed approach, instead of building their own solutions from scratch. Of the approximately 500 of the Snowflake customers that appear in the Forbes Global 2000 rankings, 95.2% use at least one of the tools presented in this report, while 71% use three or more.
To develop the report, Snowflake analysed the usage patterns of nearly 6,000 of its active customers with existing on-demand or capacity contracts that generated revenue between June 1, 2021 and June 1, 2022. Overall, companies invest in six technology capabilities when building their marketing data stacks. The report identified technology vendors that are “Leaders” and “Ones to Watch” in each of the six categories outlined below:
- Analytics: Solutions that process a diverse set of data analytics across behaviour, product, mobile, web and various other spaces, and make them available for storage in an organisation’s platform (single source of truth), to help understand what drives consumer actions and optimise ROI.
- Integration and modelling: This category includes technologies and tools that cleanse and model raw data so that it can be ingested and organised into a single repository before being integrated, analysed and shared.
- Identity and Enrichment: Solutions that identify individuals or groups of individuals by mapping disparate identifiers and touchpoints, or by using third-party datasets and analytics services, to enrich an organisation’s existing data.
- Activation and measurement: Data activation solutions are designed to take an organisation’s data stored in their central repository and activate it on channels or applications used by internal teams or accessed by customers.
- Business Intelligence: Data analysis and visualisation tools that use reports and dashboards to democratise key performance metrics for multiple types of business users, including senior executives, to make dynamic business decisions,
- Data Science & Artificial Intelligence: Platforms that help data scientists and analysts build and deploy propensity models used to automate, ensure and accelerate predictive analytics, as well as automate decision engines, processing and audience selection.
Additional findings from the report included that only 14% of organisations report they have achieved a 360-degree view of their customers. This hinders personalization, yielding poor or potentially irrelevant messaging and offers to customers.
Snowflake Marketplace helps marketers share data to improve their analytical insights. 20% 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.
Access the full report here to see a complete list of top providers delivering on each capability of the Modern Marketing Data Stack.
