Your guide to better data activation

Access to centralized customer data (even if it’s not perfect!)

Everything starts with getting your data all in one place – which most brands are already doing, at least to some extent. This means centralizing all customer data across your tech and teams into a single repository or data lake, ideally in a modern data cloud like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks. The key is to then make sure all that data is accessible to your marketing team from that central place.

Advanced customer segmentation for campaigns

Once you’ve got the data organized and accessible, it’s all about good segmentation. Enterprise pros know that any type of one-size-fits-all approach to campaigns is dead in the water. Customers want to feel like you get them.

And good segmentation doesn’t just influence campaign messaging. When marketers can self-serve and see live audience counts, it becomes really easy to see exactly how different segments are performing and adjust overall campaign strategies – like viewing different loyalty tier members, recent purchasers, those with high churn risk, and more.

This is why giving marketers access to the brand’s entire dataset is key. You want to leverage everything you know about a customer when building audiences so you can craft campaigns that don’t just land; they resonate.

Cohesive, cross-channel data activation

And this leads us to data activation. It’s not enough to know who your customers are. You need to reach them where they actually are. Whether it’s email, social media, paid ads, or carrier pigeon (okay, maybe not that one), you need to capture their interest and engagement at the right moment on the right medium.

With insights from every other channel, you’re equipped to serve the best messaging on each one individually. When activating customer data, you also want to be empowered to leverage unlimited attributes without running into data overage fees or latency issues. Slow data syncs or incomplete profiles can tank a campaign before it’s even gotten out the door.

Table stakes strategies should be easier. While these ideas may sound straightforward, achieving them in practice is another story. Many brands still actively struggle to bring this vision of clean, actionable data to life. Why? That’s where the cracks in most martech stacks start to show.

What’s missing in most martech stacks?

If you’ve ever looked at your martech stack and thought, “This should work better,” you’re not alone.

Here’s the problem: no matter how shiny and promising these platforms seem in a demo, the reality often doesn’t live up to the hype. Bells, whistles, and nice-to-look-at features are great to start, but they often belay platform limitations. You spend hours setting up campaigns. And the result? Meh. It takes way too long to build your audience. The messaging feels off. The personalization isn’t quite there. And ultimately, the customer experience falls flat.