Services 02. Collect & Measure

Data Lake

Marketers and IT often clash. Why? Marketers need an environment where all advertising, website, app, customer, or CRM data can be easily stored, accessed, and analyzed—while IT doesn’t have the experience to structure such a marketing database.

At DELVE, we know that marketing data infrastructure is achieved by building a data lake for centralized storage of accurate and trustworthy customer data. It’s an analytics environment that enables insightful reporting, allowing marketers to make quick decisions and deliver measurable impact on RoAS and revenue.

What’s most important when building a marketing data lake? Start with clarity around the types of insights or outcomes that you need to enable in advertising or marketing.

The Business Challenge

Let’s be honest: Marketers don’t do well in conversations with IT. In our experience, the key reason is lack of alignment on outcomes that technology should enable for Marketing. But that lack of alignment is sometimes also driven by legacy issues: the existing data infrastructure is built for Operations, Finance, or HR—not to solve customer-centric problems.

That’s why marketers are increasingly building their own data infrastructure to answer questions such as: Who are my brand’s highest value customers? What are those customers’ psychological or demographic characteristics? What are the products that customers buy first? What are the keywords that drive highest LTV customers? And so on.

A data lake serves as a marketing “data clean room” for accurate and trustworthy customer data. Data lakes have both structured and unstructured data, they can use low-cost storage, and can be built from off-the-shelf components. The only requirement is that it address key marketing use cases, such as resolving user identity across various walled gardens, enriching first-party data with second-party data, or enabling MTA and MMM use cases.

Data lakes create an analytics environment where marketers will spend most of their time—especially after third-party identifiers deprecation.

The Benefits of Solving It

When your marketing team has a working data lake, your brand will capture the following benefits:

Ownership of the technology and intellectual property. DELVE designs bespoke data lakes with off-the-shelf components from Google Cloud Platform, and your data lake will be fully in-housed.
Foundation for building an in-house Data Science team that reports to Marketing
Full-funnel reporting, from the first impression served all the way to customer LTV
Reporting that tells a story, not just shows the numbers
Ability to identify what’s working, what’s not, and why
Automation of routine targeting and optimization activities, giving Marketing the time to think creatively about growing the brand

Our Approach To The Data Lake

Our Process

DELVE’s Consulting and Engineering teams will partner with your Marketing team to identify what’s blocking your ability to generate insights from existing data warehouses and/or data sources.
DELVE will identify all first party and external data inputs that Marketing wants to store, analyze, and take action on.
DELVE, your team, and your stakeholders will agree on the outcomes that your marketing data lake should enable.
DELVE will propose a data schema, cloud technology components to build a data lake, timeline, milestones, estimated budget, and definition of expected value.
Upon internal approval, DELVE will build your custom marketing data lake.
DELVE can then deploy and manage your marketing data lake as an outsourced partner, or pass its management and maintenance to your internal IT team.

Your Outcomes

A marketing “owned and operated” data environment, or data lake
A data lake that is purpose-built to answer your most burning marketing questions, or to deliver key marketing insights
A quick, agile environment that can deliver insights that translate into measurable value, such as identifying waste in advertising or focusing on high RoAS activities