February 2023 Summaries

Data Activation is emerging as the key to staying ahead of the competition and driving customer engagement. The concept involves unlocking customer insights in the warehouse and making them actionable, which has become a single source of truth for marketing teams. A centralized data stack makes the Customer 360 dream a reality by providing complete customer and company-level information. Data activation helps marketers deliver more value, faster, by making data accessible and actionable for business success. Marketers need to collaborate closely with data teams to be effective in using their valuable customer data. The future of the data warehouse lies in activation, not data collection, where true self-service and data democratization come from making data actionable for business outcomes. Data Activation is essential for harnessing the competitive advantage of companies by using their warehouses as the single source of truth for intelligent segmentation and highly personalized outreach.

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing contact or account data with additional information, allowing marketing teams to better understand their customers and prospects, target them more effectively, and deliver successful campaigns. With third-party data enrichment providers like Apollo.io, Clearbit, ZoomInfo, PeopleDataLabs, and InsideView, marketers can automatically enrich their data without manually collecting it, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. By leveraging enriched data, marketing teams can implement various use cases such as personalization, behavioral targeting, lookalike modeling, social media targeting, predictive lead scoring, and geotargeting to drive higher conversion rates and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

With third-party cookies and ad blockers becoming more prevalent, advertisers are struggling to measure campaigns and send conversion data back to ad platforms for optimization. Google offline conversions offer a semi-permanent solution to this issue, allowing advertisers to track and measure advertising efforts. This method uses first-party data to build audiences based on offline actions, such as purchases or form submissions, and can be used for remarketing or ad exclusions. To set up Google Ads attribution via offline conversions, advertisers need a team with diverse skill sets, including marketing, web, product, revOps, data analytics, engineering, and project management. Alternatively, they can use the traditional method of setting up conversion tracking via the Google Conversion API, but this requires more technical expertise. A simplified approach is also available through Census, a data activation platform that provides a ready-made connection from data warehouses to Google Ads. Offline conversions are considered the future of Google Ads attribution, and advertisers should consider implementing this method to optimize their campaigns and improve ROI.

In an economic downturn, businesses face declines in sales and profits, and individuals risk potential job losses, making it essential to be prepared to survive and thrive. The data industry is particularly vulnerable, but certain roles are safer than others, such as high-level engineers who are in short supply during a recession. To protect your data career, upskill by learning new skills like Python and SQL, learn to sell your value by understanding the business side of things and finding ways to demonstrate its importance, and make connections with people outside your company and industry to tap into their networks when needed. Ultimately, getting laid off is not the end of the world, but it can be an opportunity to reflect on what you really want and realign your journey, and joining a community like the Operational Analytics Club can provide support and help you navigate the process.

Today we're excited to announce Census Enrichment inside our data activation platform, with our launch partners Clearbit and Apollo.io. We're enabling marketers and data teams to build Customer 360 profiles that combine first- and third-party data in one source of truth – the data warehouse. Just enrich once and use everywhere. The current challenge in enrichment is where to enrich across many fragmented systems. Census Enrichment solves this problem by integrating enriched data into the warehouse. With Census Enrichment, users can automatically add enrichment to Entities in their data warehouse from our partner enrichment services Clearbit and Apollo with just a few clicks. This allows for better personalization, simplified enrichment workflow, enhanced insights, and more comprehensive customer profiles that can be activated across all marketing tools with ease.

This interview with Martin Jefferies, Head of Marketing at Smartify, highlights the company's approach to data-driven marketing. Smartify uses a straightforward data stack with BigQuery as its warehouse and Customer.io for customer engagement. The team has adopted Reverse ETL using Census to populate Customer.io with data from their warehouse, enabling personalized marketing efforts. By leveraging existing data and avoiding another silo of data, Smartify was able to choose Reverse ETL over CDP, which offered faster implementation times and more flexibility in its use case for personalizing marketing campaigns to drive product conversions.

The text highlights the importance of building a single source of truth (SSOT) for marketing teams by creating a centralized warehouse that unifies their data needs. This approach helps marketers make data-driven decisions, reduces silos between departments, and improves the quality of data. The SSOT serves as a bridge between the data and marketing teams, enabling collaboration and better decision-making. By adopting this approach, organizations can unlock the power of their customer data, drive operational systems with data, and ultimately improve business outcomes.

The importance of investing in a best-in-breed data activation platform cannot be overstated as it enables business teams to take action on data from the warehouse, going beyond traditional dashboards and reverse ETL. Data activation unlocks value from existing data, making it essential for organizations to adopt a composable CDP stack that combines products working best for their business needs. However, most "all-in-one" solutions will not support data activation capabilities, instead treating all integrations as event streams, which can lead to data firehose problems and increased costs. Warehouse-native data activation tools like Census provide robust support for bulk APIs, giving users more control over what data gets synced, while also offering self-service features for both data teams and business users. It is recommended to choose an event collection tool before looking at data activation, but organizations should not fall into the trap of "data perfectionism" by waiting for perfect data before activating it. By implementing a best-of-breed data activation platform, organizations can ensure agnosticism towards future data collection solutions and unlock the full potential of their customer data.