Data Warehouse + CDP: Unifying Data and Marketing Teams Once And For All

Whether you’ve worked on a data team or a marketing team—or have managed either—you know that a seamless hand-off between the two can be tricky. Even with good intentions and strong communication, missing the connection for a smooth data transition is common.

Perhaps your data engineers know how they want to structure their data warehouse, but they are waiting for the marketing team to provide them with the important questions they plan to investigate once the warehouse is available. Or maybe the marketing team is determining how to launch the latest campaign to customers, but your data team hasn’t connected all the necessary data sources to the data warehouse.

These blockers can bring huge setbacks to your business. At best, this will lead to lots of rework. At worst, you’ll end up with incorrect communications to customers.

In this article, we’ll look at how a customer data platform (CDP) alongside your data warehouse helps ensure marketing and data teams stay on the same page. We’ll take a deeper look at what marketing and data professionals do, discussing how they can all use such a CDP without encountering the situations described above. 

A closer look at the data-to-marketing hand-off

To better understand how to nail the hand-off between data and marketing, let’s look at the specific stakeholders involved. Specifically, we’ll talk about data engineers, data analysts, and marketers. Each role is essential to the process and its success, but they often don’t understand one another or the challenges they face.

The data engineers

Generally speaking, data engineers are the most technical of the bunch. If you need to optimize a database or tune a machine learning model, then you’ll rely on your data engineers. They’ll help structure data in your data warehouse and ensure that making queries against data sources is performant.

The data analysts (or data scientists)

Data analysts might not be buried in the nitty-gritty technical details of your data, but they’re still in the technical space. The analysts have a lot of technical knowledge and expertise. They build reports and perform statistical analysis of your datasets. Data analysts focus on the use of this data by business-focused members of your team.

The marketers

Marketing folks know the ins and outs of what your customers are looking for when they come to your business. Marketers want to know how to meet customer needs better, so they pay attention to the data analysis that comes from the data team. The marketers will often ask new questions—ones that haven’t been addressed in data analysis reports thus far—but they don’t typically have the expertise to do the analysis themselves.

Collaboration is critical

All three of these roles are essential to successfully using data in your business. Ensuring these team members collaborate well is critical to making their work fruitful. However, many complexities challenge your ability to get this right.

• Data engineers and analysts know they work for their marketing stakeholders, but their tools are often complex and highly technical.

• Marketers know they need to use data but don’t have experience in the technical fields where data analysis happens.

• As analysis is performed, the data may be incomplete or changing.

• Regulations around what data can be used for which purpose can change quickly, too.

Yes, it’s important to ensure data teams have good tools for dealing with their data. However, at the end of the day, marketers also need good tools that are easy to use to activate that data. If no one can turn that data into information for business decision-making, then it doesn’t matter if your data is stored securely, organized perfectly, and analyzed regularly. 

All of this brings us to a big question: What type of CDP do you need?

CDP and the data warehouse. A match made in heaven?

A key trend in the CDP space recently is compatibility with the data warehouse. 

This makes sense. In addition to customer data collected by a CDP, businesses also have critical information about things like subscription services, products, accounts and more residing in their data warehouse. 

What’s called for is something of a hybrid approach – a system that gives access to real-time event streams required by business teams, combined with batch warehouse workloads needed by more technical teams.

At Segment, our team has been heads down on this “best of both worlds approach”, offering a hybrid CDP solution that caters to both real-time and batch data needs.

Right out of the gate, Segment can be integrated with any part of your data warehouse, offering your data teams flexibility and scalability from the get go. Meanwhile, your marketing team will get real-time data in an easy to use interface, allowing them to build highly-targeted audiences that can be activated in hundreds of pre-built integrations.

Conclusion

If your organization wants to be successful in having raw data activated throughout the organization, you’ll need to meet the needs of every player in that data hand-off. Your data team needs one thing—a solid data warehouse—while your marketing team needs another—an easy-to-use suite of data activation tools. If either of these is missing, then the process will break down, and no one will be happy.

By adopting a CDP alongside your data warehouse, you empower your data team to focus on providing awesome insights to your marketers. Your marketers can make sure your customers find what they’re looking for from your business. Providing a great foundation with the ability to add more as needed is key to this model.

Are you looking to get started with a CDP? Request a demo of Twilio Segment, and find out why over 25,000 businesses trust it to help them nail the hand-off between data and marketing every day.