Can Snowflake be your marketing cloud?

I used to think of Snowflake as a data warehouse. You know, a place where all your data can live in one location so that you can control access, governance, data accuracy, and more. However, Snowflake's scalable infrastructure and native separation of storage and compute has completely changed the game for how organizations are holistically looking at data.

These advantages around scalability, storage, and secure access resonate with a data engineer. But what about a marketer? What benefits can Snowflake and its industry-leading Data Cloud offer marketers? Can the technical tool that is heralded for supporting multi-cloud infrastructure environments offer something to marketers who are focused on open rates, email conversation, personalized experiences, and pipeline creation?

Hightouch invited Snowflake experts to participate in a two-part LinkedIn Live series to discuss this topic. The macro question was: Is Snowflake a Marketing Platform?

Alec Haase, a Product Evangelist at Hightouch, explained in Part 1: The Business Benefits of Making Snowflake Your Marketing Platform that:

Deploying audiences to ad platforms or sending profile information to email tools helps to create the personalized experiences desired and expected by the modern consumer.

The platform designed to deliver this kind of marketing control is the Customer Data Platform or CDP. However, according to the CDP Institute, only 58% of companies with a deployed CDP say it delivers significant value, leaving much to be desired from traditional, packaged CDP solutions. Instead, organizations are embracing a composable CDP centered on Snowflake's Data Cloud to manage marketing programs that deliver relevant, impactful experiences.

One example Lourenco Mello, a Product Marketer at Snowflake, provided was data latency. Have you ever seen an ad for a product you already bought? That's likely due to latency, and it's an expensive error.

Lourenco explains that:

With the Data Cloud, Marketers work with fresh data that is updated in near real-time, and it includes all the shared data that organizations work with throughout their ecosystem.

Using the Data cloud as your single source of truth, you eliminate data silos across:

• Internal/external data
• 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-party data
• Unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data
• Batch data
• Streaming Data
• Shared data

A data engineer is excited to reduce latency, while a marketer is excited to reduce duplicative ad spend. Either way, data is no longer isolated in a CDP -- it lives in Snowflake, where it's ready to be activated.

What does Data Activation look like? Lourenco provided two quick examples: connecting marketing data to supply chain data so marketers can push excess inventory or limiting the number of ads served when inventory is low. Both tactics focus on syncing Snowflake data to marketing tools to optimize ad spend.

In Part 2: Technical Deep Dive & Demo of Snowflake: The Marketing Platform, Sri from Snowflake and Andrew Jesien from Hightouch delivered a live demo showcasing how you can activate your 1st and 3rd party data in Snowflake in your favorite marketing tools.

Telling the story of a fictitious media company called Invention Media, they built an audience in Snowflake. They demonstrated how you can use Hightouch to run advertising campaigns on Facebook to an existing audience based on their other viewing habits. They answered questions about native diffing, data copying, and more.

Andrew and Sri also showed how you can use a drag-and-drop interface to build a cohort of users who satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, and viewing history. They took Snowflake tables, abstracted them in the hightouch platform to SQL queries that execute on Snowflake, and then distributed that data down to Facebook's APIs.

The integration between Snowflake and Hightouch enables you to access user data, build segments or cohorts and sync them to ad platforms, email personalization tools, and more.

Is all of this enough to call Snowflake a marketing platform? Is Snowflake a viable alternative to a traditional CDP? You can catch the recordings here or create a free Hightouch Workspace to get started.