Having access to high-quality data to drive positive changes in your business is just one part of the deal. What’s missing is the means to analyze and interpret data so you can use it in marketing campaigns. In this article, we take a look at the eight best marketing data platforms you should consider this year.
May 24 2023 ● 5 min read
A marketing data platform is a marketing technology that connects all available company’s customer and prospect data sourced from different software, channels, and media.
This data can come from CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or eCommerce platforms, email marketing software, mobile marketing apps, web analytics, CMS (Content Management Systems), etc.
By assembling all this data, marketers and businesses can easily summarize the insights, and find who their audience is and how they are interacting with the company’s services or products.
A marketing data platform can create unified customer profiles so you can take real-time actions to help the customer throughout their customer journey. So, for example, if a customer abandons their cart or gives up in the middle of setting up their trial account, you can reach out with personalized messaging and entice them to finish the purchase, trial, etc.
Company-wise, a marketing data platform can unify the siloed data from different platforms. In situations where raw data exists in data silos that are accessible only to one department in the organization, a CDP removes those barriers and creates a single source of truth that provides all departments with fresh data within their access levels.
Finally, by segmenting and analyzing available user data, marketing teams are able to tailor their future marketing campaigns based on accurate data analytics.
In addition to the marketing data platform described above, digital marketing also requires a data management platform (DMP) and a customer data platform (CDP). Each of these three has an important function and should not be mistaken for one another.
Now, let’s take a look at how popular data marketing platforms stack against each other.
Whatagraph is a marketing data platform for connecting, visualizing, and sharing data. Users can pull data from over 40 sources and create in-depth interactive reports and dashboards. Businesses that need to consolidate customer insights from multiple data points can use Whatagraph to easily move data from popular marketing platforms to Google BigQuery for advanced analytics and deeper insights from historical data.
Best known for: Automated marketing visualization
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Pricing: Four pricing plans: Professional for five users and 25-50 sources, Premium for ten users and 50-100 sources, and Custom, for 100+ sources and unlimited number of users. Data transfers to BigQuery available for a flexible fee either as an add-on or standalone service.
How about you try Whatagraph for 7 days for free?
Book a personalized walkthrough to learn more about its features or request a free trial today.
Adverity is another alternative after Whatagraph. It is positioned as a platform to empower next-generation marketers and features an integrated data platform for connecting, managing, and using data at different scales. This marketing data software allows businesses to blend disparate data sources, such as sales, finance, marketing, and advertising platforms, to create business intelligence.
With automated connectivity to hundreds of data sources, Adverity is a serious choice for scaling and automating your data operations.
Best known for: Marketing analytics, multi-channel tracking
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Price: Custom pricing
Klaviyo is a customer data platform that focuses on two major solutions for businesses: email and SMS. Email marketing and automation is one of Klaviyo’s best-rated services, often described by its clients as simple and easy to use, even for non-technical people.
Featuring a flexible, real-time database, Klaviyo helps businesses centralize their first-party data from their entire technology stack and even integrates with Whatagraph.
Best known for: Marketing automation
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Price: Custom quote
Offering an array of reporting and budgeting tools, ReportGarden helps you track your client’s PPC campaigns and optimize their ad spend.
In addition to reports and dashboards, this Whatagraph alternative comes with SEO tools such as site audits and keyword trackers. For agencies, this marketing data software helps create client proposals and showcase success in managing PPC campaigns.
Best known for: A large number of paid ads integrations
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Price: ReportGarden starts at $89 a month with a two-month’s discount if you sign up for a year.
Since 2021, Bloomreach Experience has merged with Exponea, a robust CDP platform, and together, the companies have carved one of the world’s best commerce experience cloud solutions. Bloomreach Experience Manager’s headless architecture allows the separation of the content from the presentation layer. This way content editors can create content once and then publish it to websites, mobile apps, social media, etc. Among its highlights, the platform features a powerful data integration that supports different file imports and APIs, enabling easy-to-set nurture campaigns and email marketing.
Best known for: Customizable workflows
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Price: Custom pricing
Previously known as Autopilot, Ortto markets itself as a global marketing company that helps clients collect unified customer information through its formidable CPD and segmented insights into the buyer’s journey. As an all-in-one marketing data software, Ortto is best known for its automated email response, drag-and-drop personalized email builder, and breathtaking templates.
Best known for: Automatic email responses
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Price: Four pricing plans — Campaign at $29 (2,000 contacts), Pro at $99 (5,000 contacts), Business at $299 (20,000 contacts), and Enterprise at a custom quote.
Segment is one of the leaders in providing resilient marketing data platforms for clients who want an easy-to-use way to direct their data to different channels. If you’re a small business with less than 1,000 visits per day, you can test Segment for free. However, the price rises considerably if you receive thousands of visits per day.
Segment is an ideal choice if you need a client-side software application that can make analytics data available to multiple teams with different use cases.
Best known for: Customer data platform
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Price: Three pricing plans — Free (up to 1,000 visitors), Team starting at $120 (10,000 visitors), and Business at a custom quote.
Insider provides one of the best personalization and AI optimization tools. It allows marketers to attribute customer data across channels and customer databases, predict their future behaviors using an AI intent engine, and enable the orchestration of individual experiences. A curiosity: After using the service, IKEA managed to decrease app uninstalls by 50% and increase cart recovery by 11%.
Best known for: Mobile notifications
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Price: Custom pricing
Marketers handle a lot of data — often overwhelming amounts sourced from various channels. That is why marketing agencies and enterprises rely on so-called marketing data hubs.
But what is a marketing data hub?
A marketing data hub is a data platform that connects the data from scattered sources to one place, helps you organize this data, analyze it through advanced visualization, and share insights that fuel intelligent decision-making.
Let’s explore three cases where a marketing data hub can help you do more with less.
Marketing agencies seem to be in a constant state of shifting. Managing directors are making sure clients are satisfied, aside from monitoring and growing profit margins. On top of that, they need to ensure the current resources meet the inbound workflow. And as if that’s not enough, they need to keep an eye on industry trends that could make once lucrative streams dry up in a week.
This is a lot of work to manage. At the same time, strategists are overwhelmed with ad hoc requests, managing several complex tools, and generally just trying to keep the system running.
Since the days of media buying are long gone, and the focus has shifted to social media, agencies of today need to be lean and nimble, which leaves little time for building new revenue opportunities. Add scattered data sources into the mix, and you have the recipe that 9 out of 10 agencies are struggling with.
It’s a real scenario where an agency spends more time managing complex or fixing broken data pipelines than interpreting and analyzing the data returns.
By implementing a marketing data hub, agencies can bring order to their data flow and save time, but that’s just the beginning.
Next, an agency’s data team, rarely data scientists, can organize data from scattered sources. By blending sources, aggregating and grouping dimensions and metrics, or unifying names, they can gain faster insights and help clients decide what move to make next.
Once the team starts to generate real, tangible value for clients, they can afford to grow. Combined with their new data management and automation capabilities, they can develop proprietary analytics models to help them increase the scope and profit margin for existing accounts while attracting new clients.
The advantages of a marketing data hub are not limited to agencies. In fact, the more your business relies on marketing data, the more benefits you can reap from all-in-one marketing data platforms.
Let’s take e-commerce brands for example.
Whether it’s athletic apparel, consumer electronics, or home improvement supplies, all these brands need to interpret vast amounts of digital marketing data from their marketing activities.
To keep their position as market leaders, these brands must quickly capture the insights hidden in their performance metrics.
Can they achieve that by manually stitching their data in Google Sheets? Not likely.
They use advanced marketing data hubs that seamlessly connect data from their marketing sources, allow their teams to easily organize the data before visualization, and quickly share the insights with decision-makers.
But couldn’t they just send their raw data to advanced BI tools for their data engineers to handle?
They could, but that would significantly slow down their marketing teams. Marketers must stay alert and adapt to changes, especially during seasonal events like Black Friday. They can’t afford to wait for data wizards in the BI department to attend to a single service request ticket.
These marketers need data platforms they can own and understand while playing along the rest of the enterprise’s data stack. A marketing data hub helps them maintain a competitive edge over rival brands.
You don’t have to be a multinational enterprise to reap the benefits of a marketing data hub. The marketing industry is becoming more democratized every day, which enables even small brands to compete with big players.
Small marketing teams are already adopting intelligent language models that allow them to outsource some content creation to machines to scale their output.
A marketing data hub works in a similar way — allows smaller businesses to gain the power of data management and intelligence that was once limited only to big brands.
Each of these marketing data platforms comes with a set of features that have one thing in common — to provide a single view of the company’s marketing data and empower teams to direct their marketing efforts towards personalized experiences that hit the target.
If you don’t know which one to choose, I recommend you start with Whatagraph.
Whatagraph has everything you need for a smooth data experience. Integrate your marketing metrics from over 40 sources and visualize them using pre-loaded reports and dashboard templates.
Want to secure your marketing data from unexpected events or run an in-depth analysis?
With Whatagraph, you can move your marketing data to a cloud-based data warehouse in only four steps.
Yes, you’ve heard it right. No coding knowledge is needed. Start our free trial and see how easy it gets to set up your data warehouse with Whatagraph.
Published on May 24 2023
WRITTEN BY
Nikola GemesNikola is a content marketer at Whatagraph with extensive writing experience in SaaS and tech niches. With a background in content management apps and composable architectures, it's his job to educate readers about the latest developments in the world of marketing data, data warehousing, headless architectures, and federated content platforms.
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