Do you have all the data but it’s siloed in various marketing tools? How do you connect, pipe, and automate data transforms to get value out of your data and why? In this interview, Peep sits down with Dan McGaw, CMO @ EffinAmazing. Dan breaks down marketing automation tools, customer data platforms, and what you can do to plan and organize your marketing tech stack and data pipeline.
what's the difference between CDI and
CDP this is kind of becoming a blurred
line because marketing automation tools
are now saying well I'm a CDP because I
store your customer data and I could
show you the life-long of them and I can
send that somewhere else
but isn't that really a CDP is that
really a marketing automation tool hey
guys I'm here with Dan McCall from effin
amazing and then here is an expert at
building and optimizing marketing tech
stacks marketing tech stacks are a
problem for marketers because there's a
huge amount of data silo vacation it's
like you have your email marketing tool
but it doesn't talk to CRM so if you
want to email people who bought these
two products you often can't do that or
they're separate from digital analytics
where I want to email people that bought
these two products but not this one and
read this blog post and after marketers
are not able to do this so how do you
solve all that yeah so it's it's
definitely really really difficult but I
mean it's fun enough when you say this
whole kind of explanation there's some
tools that come to mind I think you're
probably familiar with one of the most
popular ones will just hold that i/o
Sohal which is like kind of the
traditional customer data platform so
you have customer data infrastructure
and all of these different ways that you
can pass data through different tools
but I'd have to say the most popular one
is zapier right like if you're not using
zapier then I mean you kind of live on
an island I guess and I call it zapier
it's not zapier to me it's zap-zap you
I'm calling it zapier I don't care I'm
putting my flag in the ground on that
one but zapier is by far one of my
favorite ways to automate everything and
keep him up to date but the whole would
be the other tool that I would use but
that's a bigger picture less
integrations okay what other CDP's or
similar tools could you use to set up
email CRM and all these other tools to
make them talk to each other yeah
segment is really popular segment com is
really good they have the ability to
pass the data between a lot of different
tools and be able to use them as sources
and destinations I really like segments
we're a solutions partner of theirs we
recently were introduced to Mehta router
we ever heard a meta router Mehta
routers very much similar they're a
little bit younger so they're a lot
cheaper right now
and they give you much more volume with
passing data between tools so between
those two they're known as what's a CDI
customer data infrastructure so they're
all about taking data from one tool
setting it to another they just require
you to basically push that data compared
to zapier where you can kind of go fetch
data and pull it around so just a little
bit different what's different what's
the difference between CDI and CTP yeah
a great question so the CDP actually
customer data platform stores customer
data so this is kind of becoming a
blurred line because marketing
automation tools are now saying well I'm
a CDP because I store your customer data
and I can show you the life lifelong of
them and I can send that somewhere else
but is that really a CDP is that really
a marketing automation tool so the
domain difference between CDI and CDP CD
is don't store that is pipe CDP's
actually store the data about the
customer right yeah I mean we love CDP
for the you know single source of truth
type of type of stuff so everything sits
together is there is so is there any any
any other way to do this single source
of true type of stuff or you have to use
the CDP yeah the CDP is really becoming
more popular but what we really have
started to learn is that it's not only
about having one central location of
data it's about making sure that data is
constantly pushing from all of these
different tools to keep all these
different tools up-to-date because your
marketing automation tool if it's not
your CDP you're constantly having a push
data to it so as data gets updated in
Salesforce you need to push that data
from Salesforce to a CDP the CDP
hopefully pushes it somewhere else or
you have a different way of creating a
data pipeline which they think is for
marketers it's kind of a not known and
not really familiar but really the data
pipeline is what keeps all these things
going and the CDP just becomes a big
axle in that that pipeline so who is
responsible for all this should it be
the marketer or the engineer yeah
definitely in between so a lot of
organizations have a marketing
operations person and that's typically
the person who does this so it's usually
owned by marketing operations or sales
operations I don't recommend it to be
owned by engineering just because they
don't think about hey this is their
first name they think about like this is
a user ID okay I have a random hash
they're users the marketer is going to
think about this as a customer so it's a
little bit separate put marketers at the
same time don't
think about the technical ability of
attaching a user to an ID number and
then having that manage throughout
different systems so hopefully there's a
marketing operations person in the
middle that can help translate for both
of them and that's also what a lot of
companies hire us for is to figure out
what are their operations of all this
data how do we manage the customer
journey and things like that and some
marketing operations in your definition
is something something like growth
engineer I've seen that title of being
thrown around
yeah growth engineer would definitely
fall into that classification however
the growth engineer is much more focused
typically on taking demand generation
efforts and then getting that to turn
into some sort of viral loop or
something like that
which is much more the product the
marketing operations people are less
focused on the viral loop in many cases
that's not their their objective their
objective is how do I store all this
information about a user or a customer
and then make it so we can report upon
that later so there really operations of
marketing a lot of times you see these
people building emails as well doing
more operationally focused tasks but
they're not the growth engineer because
their job is not measured just upon
growth of new users right so that's one
thing that typically you see marketing
operations at larger companies where
this is a primary focus so in smaller
companies usually this is done by
marketing and marketing is asking
engineering to do something about it
and that's where it can be a little
difficult to get things done right right
right so talking about difficult what
are the typical things that can go wrong
when somebody's starting to you know I
call this kind of data integration
things yeah the first thing we see
everybody forget about is planning they
just start going out and doing it so a
thing that I don't think a lot of
marketers think about is taxonomy or
schema and those words are kind of
synonyms of each other taxonomy and
schema are like just what we're gonna
call things so yes first name is really
easy company is really easy title is
really easy but when you start getting
into attributes about like how did
somebody at C Excel go through a course
did they enroll or did they register do
they start there's different names that
are used these all have to match between
all the systems and that's where we
really see a lot of mistakes happen as
you might be familiar with UTM do our
other product that's all about data
governance and making it so that people
can store UTM is the same way every time
so they can report upon it later you
have that same problem in the stack
we're marketing automation calls it a
registered and then you have this the
CRM that's calling it enrolled and if
those two things don't line up the data
it actually doesn't map over very easily
so you have to think about that
especially if the stack is bigger than
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Dan’s marketing tech stack tips:
- Engineers shouldn’t own the marketing tech stack pipeline
- Planning is key
- Use the same taxonomy in all your tools
About Dan McGaw, CMO @ EffinAmazing
Dan is a seasoned veteran of growth marketing and analytics space. His expertise lies in helping businesses extract and interpret the right data to grow their revenue exponentially.
He’s the founder and CMO of Effin Amazing, an analytics and marketing stack agency specialized in using data and analytics tools to increase mid- and bottom-funnel conversion rates. He’s also the CEO and Founder of utm.io, a leading tool that helps brands track their marketing campaigns with UTM links.
Dan previously served as the Head of Marketing at Kissmetrics, and spent time as a mentor at 500 Startups. He works as a CMO consultant for a number of high-growth companies, implementing tools, offering support, and analyzing data.
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About The Pe:p Show
The Pe:p Show is a series of short and to the point videos. Topics that I’m covering go way past conversion stuff – it’s about optimizing all the things: your life, health, relationships, work, and business. I will also be interviewing industry peers on various topics like digital marketing, growth hacking, and more.
