With AI advancements and tool integration driving explosive year-over-year growth in the Martech landscape, a scalable marketing technology platform is no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses aiming to stay ahead.
As CMOs strive to deliver exceptional customer experiences and data-driven insights, the development of not just internal tooling but also customer-facing platforms becomes paramount. However, the path to developing such a platform can be riddled with challenges that quickly overwhelm even the most data-mature marketing firms and departments. Unsurprisingly, more and more enterprises are turning to external data partners to help streamline the development process.
In this blog post, we’ll explore a pragmatic roadmap for CMOs looking to build impactful customer-facing data products, emphasizing the crucial role a trusted data partner like Hakkoda can play in this journey.
Understanding the Needs of a Marketing Technology Platform
The foundation of a successful marketing technology platform lies in understanding the enterprise-specific requirements its development will address.
In most cases, a successful marketing technology platform must enhance customer engagement, facilitate more bespoke marketing strategies, and provide actionable insights at a cadence that keeps up with shifts in the surrounding marketplace. To achieve this, your platform should also be able to integrate with other digital tools in your arsenal and adapt as the technological landscape continues to evolve—the latter being especially paramount in the tumultuous age of AI.
Identifying the specific outcomes you want your platform to drive up front—including the key metrics you will use to gauge success—is crucial to ensuring the platform not only meets current demands but also supports the future growth of your business. The planning stage should also include an actionable strategy for continuing to improve your data product after it rolls out. An iterative approach to the design process that incorporates internal and external feedback ensures the platform continually evolves to meet user expectations.
Technical Foundations for Scalability and Market Reach
To construct a scalable and far-reaching marketing technology platform, businesses must first lay the right technical foundation. The data stack you use when developing a platform will directly inform its ability to scale with your business, what integrations are possible, and the size of its addressable market.
The Snowflake AI Data Cloud simplifies the development of scalable data products through its consumption-based pricing model, allowing organizations to pay only for the compute and storage resources they use. This flexibility enables businesses to scale their operations up or down based on demand, minimizing upfront costs and reducing financial risk.
Additionally, the Snowflake Marketplace and Native App framework facilitates the monetization of data by providing a user-friendly platform where organizations can share and sell their datasets to a broad audience of Snowflake users. This opens up new revenue streams and enhances data accessibility for developers and their teams, enabling businesses to leverage their insights while tapping into a large addressable market without the complexities of traditional data-sharing models.
Ensuring Seamless Integration with Existing Marketing Tools
Taking the necessary steps to streamline integration with existing marketing tools is another vital aspect of the development process that can help to alleviate downstream frustrations and power a more complete understanding of the customer lifecycle. A well-integrated platform ensures that insights driven by your data product can be enriched with other crucial data sources throughout your organization that may provide important context and shed light on hidden relationships.
Such a platform also enables data to flow effortlessly between various systems, breaking down silos between teams and departments and unlocking other organization-wide efficiencies not possible in a technology stack made up of standalone systems.
Success Story: Transforming Client Onboarding for a Full-Service Digital Agency
To illustrate many of the points above, consider the case of a successful platform development project for a large, full-service digital agency, which transformed its client onboarding process and unlocked powerful new efficiencies through collaboration with Hakkoda’s data experts.
At the beginning of the engagement, the agency faced challenges with a manual onboarding system that was both time-consuming to use and susceptible to human error. By developing a customer data platform (CDP) with end-to-end automation, the agency drastically reduced their onboarding time from an order of several days to one of just seven minutes. Within two months of the go-live date, the solution had scaled up to support 400 clients, giving each a more bespoke onboarding experience even as it automated out considerable bottlenecks in the process.
This collaboration underscored the importance of leveraging modern data technologies such as Snowflake and Fivetran for seamless data ingestion and transformation, as well as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for efficient infrastructure management. The CDP enabled the agency to streamline operations and focus on delivering customized marketing strategies, ultimately enhancing client satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Build Your Marketing Technology Platform Today with Hakkōda
Building a marketing technology platform in-house can be a considerable challenge even for tech-enabled enterprises like the digital agency in the example above. Assigning finite internal resources to something as colossal as the development of a new platform can introduce catastrophic disruptions to daily operations few businesses can afford.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that more and more companies in the marketing technology space and beyond are leaning more and more on the services of trusted data partners, who can bring a wealth of industry knowledge and technical expertise to product development without placing additional stresses on internal teams and operations. The success seen by the digital agency in the example above is a testament to the value of such partnerships. A reliable data partner like Hakkoda not only provides the technical expertise needed to build robust, scalable platforms but also alleviates the burden on internal teams—enables them to focus on propelling their business forward.
Ready to take your marketing strategy to the next level with a customer-facing platform that grows with your enterprise? Talk to one of our experts today.
