Snowflake for Marketing Analytics: Siloes to Sales
Marketing is something every company must invest in, even well-known brands. In the past, understanding who to market to and how effective your adverts were on billboards, posters, in newspapers and magazines and on (linear) TV mainly had to rely on customer surveys and questionnaires “How did you hear about us?” to assess effectiveness. Surveys and questionnaires are still a useful marketing tool but measuring the return on investment for marketing campaigns is still a challenge for many companies.
Don’t waste customer’s time and a Brand’s budget
The purpose of Marketing Analytics is to improve marketing campaign performance, meaning targeting the right audiences (audiences that include your customers and prospects) via the right channels with relevant adverts leading to higher brand awareness and sales. This is a win-win for brands and customers as brands get a better return on their advertising spend and we, customers, get fewer annoying adverts for products and services of little interest (okay maybe a bit harsh).
Marketing continues to fund or subsidise a large part of our entertainment and online experience. The growth in digital advertising: web, social, mobile app and streaming, provides the potential for more complete and immediate feedback on audience resonance. Allied to that there are a large range of identity and household enrichment services and third-party data sets that allow brands to understand their customers and related prospects better and to help them “fish in the right ponds with better bait”.
What is known about us?
As an example, Experian compile demographic details about households. I checked my assigned classification armed only with my (UK) postcode at Mosaic Portrait. Apparently I live in an area classified as “Bank of Mum Dad”, so I am hoping to be adopted by one of my neighbours :-)
Where does Snowflake come in?
Understanding (profiling) your customers and prospects, targeting the correct audiences at the correct times via the correct channels and measuring the impact of campaign actions from end to end is a data problem.
What do you need to know?
For more effective advertising you need to get your adverts in front of your target customers and prospects. For that you need to learn about your customer’s buying, browsing, viewing and location habits to know which venues, publishers, web sites, search keywords, TV programs and publications to target. This requires enriching your own customer data to correlate your expanded customer profiles with candidate advertising channels, choosing the right publishers to place your adverts and collecting all the campaign log data to capture impressions, views, clicks and reconcile that with web site and store visits, and finally online and point of sale purchases.
Where is all my data?
Brands only directly capture a fraction of the data about their customers they require to run effective advertising. Much of their data is captured by third parties such as clickstream data (customer journeys) captured by web and mobile tracking services, sentiment, social network and interest data captured by social media, transactional data captured by SaaS and on premise systems and survey data captured by Marketing Agencies. The full customer picture also requires linking you own first party customer data with data captured by third parties including demographic, health, government, geolocation, climate and macroeconomic measures. That’s a lot of data. As a Brand this sounds like you might need an army of IT and data professionals to make this happen.
Snowflake requires less plumbing
Snowflake allows Brands to spend as much of their IT budget as possible on data analysis and less on collecting and preparing data and managing infrastructure.
Snowflake Media Marketplace
The Snowflake Media Marketplace allows Brands direct access to detailed third-party enrichment data instantly with no need to import limited and periodic data extracts. Snowflake Marketplace service providers like Adverity, Funnel, Improvado, Braze, Bizable, Amplitude and Heap can capture all a Brand’s marketing data and make it directly accessible in their Snowflake account. This avoids building, running, and maintaining data pipelines. For data sources out of reach to these providers Snowflake has a substantial set of ELT and CDC partners to automate custom pipelines.
Data Privacy
Correlating your customer data with third-party data sets may require using a privacy preserving clean room interface to enable a Brand to correlate their data with data enrichers and publishers. Snowflake’s no copy data sharing, rich data governance options and shareable native code makes data collaboration with sensitive data inherently more secure and provides a secure platform for building a privacy preserving clean room.
Snowflake for all your Business, Engineering and Data Science users
Snowflake supports all a Brand’s business and technical users concurrently, using the tools and interfaces they are most proficient with. Business users consume metrics, engineers consume data. Business users want to use Excel, PowerBI, Tableau, ThoughtSpot or other tools that let them navigate, visualise and drill down on business metrics and dimensions. For business users Snowflake and Snowflake’s partners such as AtScale and DBT help build a common semantic layer with data presented in business terms, consistently across all visualisation and analysis tools. For Technical Operations, Data Engineers and Data Analysts Snowflake has a very rich SQL dialect extending to managing all Snowflake resources. For Software Engineers and Data Scientists Snowflake has connectors for most programming languages and Snowpark supports developers who prefer programming in Python, Java or Scala and accessing data via DataFrames.
Campaign Activation
Once you know which audiences you want to target you can use a Snowflake partner solution like Hightouch to activate your campaign using Snowflake as the core Customer Data Platform. Solutions like Hightouch can synchronise your target audience data held in Snowflake directly with Publisher’s platforms. Activation can be performed by your Marketing team directly with no need to depend on engineering staff to support.
Have we got the measure of this?
To close the loop you need to be able to track if your campaign has driven increased visitor traffic to your web site and on-premise outlets. This data is captured by web and foot fall tracking services, many of which are available on the Snowflake Marketplace. Finally you can correlate and measure the actual sales generated via your Point of Sale systems.
How does Snowflake implement Marketing Analytics?
No prizes for guessing that Snowflake uses most of the Snowflake and partner capabilities listed above. We have a published webinar available at Snowflake-on-Snowflake: How and why we built our Marketing Analytics Ecosystem which is worth a view.
