How to Activate Your Customer Data with Flywheel Software and Data Clymer

A common need we see across many of our clients is the need to optimize data to improve marketing performance. Flywheel Software (one of our valued partners) provides a turn-key solution that aligns well with this requirement, helping organizations to better understand their customers and ultimately grow their business. 

The Importance of Evaluating Marketing Performance

While organizations are typically at different stages of their overall business and data maturity cycles, any marketer will tell you that being able to evaluate an organization’s marketing performance is essential to business success. The right marketing analytics can help marketers better understand their customers and behavior, as well as prospects and how they interact with products and services.

In a recent LinkedIn survey, 43% of respondents indicated their top marketing use case was around optimizing marketing ROI.

Benefits of Evaluating Marketing Performance

• Better understand marketing ROI and ways to optimize incremental marketing spend
• Understand marketing segment performance and engagement 
• Achieve insight into customer and prospect behavior 
• Improve velocity and the ability to quickly respond to market changes 
• Gain a clear picture into what’s happening across the entire marketing funnel 
• Enable sales teams with the right tools and assets to accelerate sales cycles and close more deals

Common Marketing Performance Challenges

When it comes to marketing analytics, there is often a gap in the “rhetoric vs. the reality.” Organizations and marketers will agree that this all sounds great, yet the reality of achieving these benefits is often challenging and fleeting. If everyone can agree on the value , why is it so hard to align on how to improve marketing performance?  

Here are some of challenges we often see organizations face around marketing analytics: 

Too much data

Along with the growth of marketing technology vendors comes an exponential increase in the amount of data available to marketers. The question is not “Can I get access to data?” but instead “What data should I be accessing?”

No single source of truth

As more vendors appear, so too does the number of data silos. Thus, in order to fully understand marketing performance, all this data needs to exist in a common data warehouse where integrated data models can be created, providing a single view into an organization’s overall performance. 

Customer AND marketing data

As organizations begin to scale and get started on their data journey, it is common for customer and marketing data to exist in separate applications. Common data sources include Salesforce or Hubspot for CRM data and Marketo or Google Analytics for marketing data. Marketers need to a holistic view for timely insights, but are often stuck cobbling together data and insights from multiple platforms.

Lack of resources and skills

Scaling organizations are also often challenged by not enough resources to help drive their marketing performance. Ideally, organizations would have the following people and skillsets:

• Skilled marketers who understand campaign development and ROI
• Marketing operations talent who understand how to help orchestrate and analyze sales and marketing funnels
• Marketing analytics resources who can help with reporting and visualizations that provide timely insights to improve decision making

One (customer) size fits all

Scaling organizations are also guilty of the “one size fits all” paradigm where all customers and prospects receive the same content and messaging. Yes, this approach is better than no marketing at all, however marketing performance can be accelerated once an organization begins to segment its customers and personalize its communications.  

Data trust

The culminating factor in all of these challenges is that without attention to these items, trust in an organization’s data will diminish. This leads to teams creating additional data silos and conducting their own analysis on spreadsheets, further exacerbating the overall data and performance challenges.  

Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets to easily solve an organization’s marketing woes however there are some steps that organizations can take in order to move the needle in the right direction. 

5 Ways to Elevate Your Marketing Performance

The teams at Flywheel Software and Data Clymer have come together to create the following recommendations for ways in which you can elevate your marketing performance.

1. Build a modern marketing data stack.

This includes finding the right tools to help you ingest, organize, and activate data.

Ingest: To help organizations ingest or integrate their data from source to target destination, we typically work with tools such as Fivetran or Matillion who have various data source connectors that are designed to simplify the data integration process and move data from source into a target destination, such as Snowflake.

Organize: Once data has been replicated within the target destination (i.e. Snowflake), we then work with data orchestration and data transformation tools like Matillion and dbt to help orchestrate inbound and outbound data flows as well as create a common data model that data reporting and visualizations tools such as Looker and Sigma can leverage. It is here where we also work with internal teams to understand their business goals and reporting requirements to ensure organizations are measuring and reporting on the right data.

Activate: Once the appropriate data models and schemas have been created, this is where Flywheel Software takes over, enabling teams to easily activate their data to better understand their customers. Some common use cases include the ability to create intelligent customer segments, measure performance within each of these segments, amplify sales efforts via social channels, and even reduce customer churn. 

2. Segment your customers and prospects. 

Segmenting your customers and prospects will allow you to better understand how various industries, horizontals, verticals, or even personas interact with your marketing campaigns and communications relative to one another. This will allow you to better align your overall go-to-market and marketing strategy with the segments that are performing best and develop potential new strategies to manage segments that are underperforming, but are still important to the organization.

Flywheel Software has an innovative approach to helping organizations automatically create customer segments within a Snowflake instance, and then leverage these across multiple marketing channels, improving segmentation and overall marketing capacity. 

3. Personalize your communications and activities. 

Establishing customer and prospect segments will  allow you to personalize your marketing strategies and create content and tactics that will better resonate with the needs and wants of that segment. 

One typical personalization use case is creating a customer 360, which involves developing a master customer record based on aggregating customer data from across the organization. At Data Clymer, we have worked with organizations like the Las Vegas Raiders, the San Francisco Giants, the Indianapolis Colts, and many other professional sports organizations to develop a “Fan Golden Record.” This allows teams to understand their fan behavior and create personalized content and promotions that can further drive fan engagement. 

Beyond sports, we have worked with organizations like JAMF, Shinesty, and Harvard Business Review to accelerate their marketing analytics.

“Data Clymer has been an amazing partner to help maintain and improve our BI stack so we can get business users the data and insights they need to make informed decisions.” —Jens Nicolaysen, Founder and CMO, Shinesty

4. Modernize your marketing analytics.

Yes, all marketing software tools will have some built-in analytic tools to support marketing specific reporting and campaign metrics. However, if an organization really wants to understand the impact of marketing upon its business and growth, a more modern and advanced strategy needs to be followed. This includes creating a single source of truth of all your marketing and customer data within a data warehouse like Snowflake and then leveraging a business reporting and visualization tool like Sigma Computing.

As a key component of the modern data stack, Sigma not only provides the ability to create reports and dashboards directly from Snowflake data, but also provides an easy-to-use interface that allows data analysts and other data consumers the ability to create their own reports, promoting the democratization of data across the organization. 

5. Improve customer retention. 

Savvy marketers know that it is often easier to grow revenue from existing clients than it is to generate revenue from new customers. Understanding customer retention rates as well as expansion revenue from existing customers is a key component to accelerating overall revenue growth. While a properly tuned CRM system can help identify new vs. expansion revenue and overall customer retention rates, applying expansion data to previously developed customer segments and developing personalized marketing strategies to existing customers is often reinventing the wheel. A marketing data activation platform like Flywheel can greatly aid in this effort. 

The Data Activation Dream Team: Flywheel Software + Data Clymer

We are extremely excited to partner with Flywheel Software and help our joint customers not only create a modern marketing analytics solution, but also one that includes a powerful data activation platform. 

“We frequently hear from enterprise data leaders that they would love to better leverage data science to drive their sales and marketing, but they aren’t sure how to achieve that vision in the data cloud. With Data Clymer, we can now offer the fastest way for teams to activate their customer data on a single end-to-end platform. We are hugely excited to bring this all together for the first time.” —David Joosten, Co-Founder and President, Flywheel Software

Quick Start Marketing Solutions

To help organizations who are seeking to accelerate their marketing analytics and activate their customer data, Flywheel Software and Data Clymer have introduced a number of joint “quick start” solutions. These solutions will enable organizations across all industries and verticals to elevate their marketing performance.

Sports and Entertainment Marketing Analytics Solution

For organizations in the sports and entertainment industry, Flywheel and Data Clymer have introduced a targeted solution aimed at helping these organizations create a “Fan Golden Record” and improve their overall fan engagement. Flywheel and Data Clymer have significant experience helping numerous professional sports organizations understand their fan base and elevate their overall marketing performance. Download our Sports Data Cloud Solution Brief for more information. 

Customer Analytics Quick Start Solution

We have a similar offering to accelerate customer data activation for organizations in retail, finance, healthcare, technology, and more. Our Customer Analytics Quick Start Solution is designed to drive revenue and engagement faster by including everything you need to get started in one powerful package. Tap into our data team of engineering and analytics experts to build the data pipelines, models, and strategy you need to target your ideal customer, retain and grow your fan base, and establish a single customer view.

We look forward to providing more integrated and joint solutions to the market as we continue to grow.

“We are thrilled to work with a partner that epitomizes the future of data. Flywheel’s applications which operate directly on top of the data warehouse combined with Data Clymer’s experience in helping clients curate a 360 degree view of their customer creates a dream team combination. As a combined solution, we are able to catapult marketing teams’ ability to understand and engage with their customers like never before, accelerating data insight and value.” —Aron Clymer, Founder and CEO, Data Clymer

Ready to Elevate Your Marketing Performance? 

If your organization is struggling with any of the marketing performance challenges mentioned previously and is in need of a modern marketing data stack with a turn-key way to activate customer data, our teams at Data Clymer and Flywheel Software can help! We have individually helped many organizations like the San Francisco Giants, Big Ten Conference, NASCAR, Google and many others.

Contact us to learn more about our joint Sports Analytics and Customer Analytics Quick Start packages and how our teams can help you elevate your marketing performance. 

About Data Clymer

Data Clymer is a next-gen data consultancy enabling clients with trusted, full-stack cloud data and analytic solutions that drive positive business results through data accessibility and actionable insights. Our experienced team of consultants are certified data engineering and analytics experts and provide a highly-personalized level of service to enable data-driven companies like Peet’s coffee, Thirty Madison, the Big Ten Conference, and the Las Vegas Raiders to unlock the value of data. www.dataclymer.com 

About Flywheel Software 

Flywheel Software, is a No Code Data Activation Platform built for Enterprise. We turn data warehouses and data lakes into growth engines. Founded by former Googlers, Flywheel’s no code interface democratizes the ability to activate customer data to any destination in minutes. Contact Flywheel today to get started activating your customer data. www.FlywheelSoftware.com