10 Benefits Of A Cloud Marketing Data Warehouse

This is Part One in our series of articles on Marketing Data Warehouses.

Imagine you need to combine the results of a marketing campaign across various channels, using nearly a dozen separate data sources. None of these sources are linked together, so you need to manually compile and summarize the data. This is obviously a very tedious process. How would you centralize this data into one place to easily query and aggregate it from these various sources?

Centralizing and making sense of data is a common problem for marketers. The number of data sources available to marketers is staggering. As of 2019, the average marketer used 16 data sources in order to understand their customers’ behavior. This number is only growing every year. In many cases, you’re working harder and harder just to keep up. Unfortunately, the methods that marketers typically use to combine and analyze data (often spreadsheets) are antiquated and slow.

Tool fatigue is another problem for marketers. According to a 2020 Salesforce State of Marketing Study, “As the amount of available data has grown, so has the number of platforms to manage it. Marketers now use an average of six data management tools, compared with three in 2018. This explains why marketers cite data unification and activation among their top five challenges.”

Marketing departments are very data-driven, and need timely cross channel analysis and reporting, data centralization, and the ability to review overall performance. Advanced marketing departments also perform predictive analytics and classifications. As the number of data sources grows, it’s clear that marketers need a way to centralize all of this data. Enter the Marketing Data Warehouse.

Before we get into the ten benefits of a marketing data warehouse, let’s briefly discuss what it is.

What Is A Cloud Marketing Data Warehouse?

A cloud marketing data warehouse is a cloud-based central platform for storing various data sources that help your marketing efforts - ads campaigns, social media, CRM, clickstream, transactions. It provides a comprehensive view of your customer and business behavior, upon which you can build actionable reports or complex machine learning algorithms.

You may ask, “what’s the difference between a Marketing Data Warehouse and a Data Management Platform (DMP)?”. There is definitely some gray area with how these are distinguished. Some companies like Hubspot use the terms interchangeably. A marketing data warehouse is typically more customizable than a DMP since it’s just a piece of raw infrastructure. It also lends itself much better to data science applications. For most purposes, you can simply use a data warehouse as the basis for a DMP. The only difference is that you’ll need to build the internal logic for audiences and hierarchies.

To learn more, check out our video, “What is a Marketing Data Warehouse, and Why Use One?”

What About Data Pipelines?

Having a marketing data warehouse is great, but it needs data to be useful. How do you get data into your data warehouse? Thankfully, there are many data pipeline available. Among the great off-she-shelf data pipelines are Fivetran, Matillion, Supermetrics, and Stitch. Or you can use open source tools like Meltano or Singer. If you have streaming data, you can use something like Confluent/Kafka, Dataflow, or Kinesis.

Why Not Just Use Third Party Dashboard Tools?

You can certainly use third party tools such as Klipfolio, Data Studio, PowerBI, Tableau, and others that consolidate your data into dashboards. These tools ingest data, and provide a reporting layer. This is certainly a great place to start for basic dashboards and reports. 

The challenge with these tools is you’ll eventually outgrow them as your needs become more sophisticated. That said, many of our clients start with third party tools, and move to a marketing data warehouse as their needs mature. We suggest looking at Google Data Studio, which is a free dashboard tool that easily connects to many popular data sources.

10 Benefits of a Cloud Marketing Data Warehouse

There are many benefits of using a marketing data warehouse. Here are 10 of them.

1. Get the data you need, when you need it. Nobody likes to wait for data. Slow access to reports is not acceptable in 2020. People need to make decisions now. A modern cloud-based marketing data warehouse provides horsepower to get you the data you need, when you need it.

2. Future proof your data needs. Maybe you’re doing simple reports today, but someday may need to do custom machine learning. By centralizing your data into a marketing data warehouse from the beginning, you have a platform that solves both today’s problems as well as tomorrow’s more sophisticated problems.

3. Infinite scalability and reliability. Using the cloud, you get scalability and reliability that you could never achieve with an on-premises system.

4. Better custom queries and functionality. Third party tools limit the types of queries you can run. Want to run a sophisticated custom query? Good luck. By using a marketing data warehouse, you aren’t limited by how you query. You can also expand your footprint in the cloud, using streaming services, advanced data pipelines and ML/AI.

5. Cost effective. Most cloud data warehouses (in particular, BigQuery or Snowflake) charge on a pay as you go pricing model. This means you’re only paying as you consume and store your data.

6. Remove data silos. Centralize your data and get rid of the silos that kill speed of insights, innovation, and action. 

7. Self Service Analytics. All too often, analysts or DBA’s have to manually create reports for various stakeholders. This consumes a lot of unnecessary time and resources. What if stakeholders could simply query a single data platform and get the reports and insights they need, without a middleman? With a marketing data warehouse, this is easily achievable.

8. Plug and play. In many cases, you can connect your existing BI tool - Data Studio, PowerBI, Tableau, etc - to your marketing data warehouse. You’ll get more robust reports than you had previously. You can leverage the power of the data warehouse to perform massive and complex calculations and aggregations on data.

9. Benefits are better marketing ROI, personalized results, 

10. Control of your data. Data is a critical resource. By using a marketing data warehouse, you own the storage and queries on your data. When you use a third party dashboard solution, your data resides in their system. Some third party providers make it very difficult or impossible to get your raw data. Why limit yourself to the canned reports provided for you?

What’s Next?

Want to learn how to get started with a marketing data warehouse? Learn more in our next blog post.

Learn more about our Marketing Data Warehouse quickstart services by contacting us today.