Understanding and Building Martech Stacks with Dan McGaw

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 bigger if you want more interviews like this subscribe to my channel

Dan’s marketing tech stack tips:

  • Engineers shouldn’t own the 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.


Emails once or twice a week on growth and optimization.


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Understanding and Building Martech Stacks with Dan McGaw