Marketing teams face considerable challenges in engaging customers at scale. As customer journeys become increasingly complex, teams need to deliver personalized messages at the right moments across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns. Keeping up can feel impossible:
- Customer journeys span dozens of channels. B2B buyers use at least 10 distinct channels from research to post-purchase support. B2C customers use at least three to five channels before purchasing.
- Marketing budgets have fallen from a 2020 high, requiring teams to cover more ground with fewer resources.
- Nearly half of marketing leaders (48%) are unable to prove the ROI of marketing, making it difficult to understand what’s working.
Marketers must make tough tradeoffs on where to focus their limited time. Teams rely on a patchwork of tools to accelerate some activities, but this patchwork of solutions creates silos or requires workarounds to connect disparate systems and data.
This reality means slow optimization, missed opportunities, and wasted potential in an increasingly competitive environment. Teams need a way to activate simultaneous campaigns and use data intelligence to drive rapid improvement.
The solution is a Compound Marketing Engine.
A Compound Marketing Engine is a new marketing technology that applies agentic AI powered by first-party data to drive toward organizational goals with little input. Unlike assistant AI solutions, agentic AI empowers teams to achieve mass personalization at scale and activate campaigns across every channel. This drives growth at an unprecedented scale, enabling consistent, data-driven optimization.
The compound marketing loop
Compound marketing reflects a new scale of marketing iteration and success. Marketing results should act like compound interest; results come quickly and build on previous investments.
Compound marketing takes what teams typically achieve in a month or quarter and achieves it in a week or less. Instead of accomplishing 1% growth a month (roughly 12% a year), agentic AI optimizes the marketing cycle to reach 2% growth a week or more — exceeding 180% annual growth.
A Compound Marketing Engine drives this growth by connecting all organizational data and systems to automate and rapidly optimize marketing processes.
The engine leverages first-party data in the enterprise cloud and designs campaigns that address the common marketing questions:
- Who do we want to target?
- What do we want to say to them?
- Where do we want to reach them?
- How did our campaign perform?
- What did we learn to do better next time?
Marketers typically address these areas with slow, manual processes. They collect data and fine-tune their audience personas. They A/B test messages on individual channels and learn what resonates best for specific buyers at individual points of the journey. And they continually test new channel combinations to reach buyers in the best places.
All this takes an incredible amount of time. Because of that, campaigns often run for an entire quarter, and teams measure quarterly performance.
A Compound Marketing Engine applies agentic AI powered by first-party data to suggest and activate successful campaigns.
How does a Compound Marketing Engine work?
At its core, a Compound Marketing Engine:
- Operates on an organization’s data cloud, which drives faster implementation, better security, decreased cost, no vendor lock-in, and – most importantly – increased effectiveness.
- As the engine learns from the organization’s data, it:
- Proposes audiences, customer journeys, and channels for campaigns.
- Executes those campaigns under the marketing team’s direction to any channel.
- Learns from the performance data to continuously improve its results.
- Employs agentic AI, which reasons and acts on a marketer’s behalf.
GrowthLoop’s Compound Marketing Engine significantly accelerates what marketers can accomplish by driving toward multiple marketing goals simultaneously and activating campaigns across every existing marketing investment.
The technology extends beyond the capabilities of a traditional or composable customer data platform (CDP) by introducing highly intelligent AI agents that deliver accurate outputs with minimal team input. Compound Marketing Engines remove many manual processes associated with CDPs with highly intuitive, chat-based agentic AI.
How does a Compound Marketing Engine fit in the martech stack?
Marketing technologies have evolved significantly over the past decade. Many formerly “best in class” solutions are no longer the best choice for enabling an AI-driven, omnichannel marketing ecosystem.
Data silos have plagued teams for years as they adopted channel-specific tools. Silos create a disjointed customer view and restrict valuable insights to individual teams, meaning no team is working with complete customer insights or understands the entire customer journey.
As organizations have optimized their martech stacks, integration with their existing martech ecosystem is their top priority to help eliminate silos. Compound Marketing Engines ensure this connectivity by connecting all tools to the data cloud.
Data clouds — Snowflake Data Cloud, Google Cloud BigQuery, Databricks, etc. — are the best data storage solutions because they can connect to all channel tools and are highly secure. Data clouds are the hub for all customer data and the best location to apply AI orchestrated by the Compound Marketing Engine.
Compound Marketing Engines evolved from composable CDPs and further reinforce how traditional CDPs, marketing clouds, and marketing automation platforms no longer provide the ideal connectivity and experience to deliver personalized customer journeys effectively.
Compound Marketing Engine use cases
The Compound Marketing Engine applies AI to the data cloud and learns from customer data and campaign results. It can help any step of campaign development, including:
- Audience segmentation - Audience Agents can suggest audiences suited for specific campaign goals, like customer churn winback, cross-selling or upselling, and new customer acquisition. The AI can quickly deliver audience lists based on demographic information or purchase behavior, like suggesting local outreach to re-engage customers or global outreach targeting buyers who face similar challenges.
- Universal Journey building - The engine orchestrates omnichannel journeys to ensure customers receive messages on the right channels at the ideal time. The engine makes it easy to build complex journeys through a visual, drag-and-drop interface, and the Journey Agent suggests the best channels, offers, and cadence to maximize results.
- Campaign insights and measurement - The engine offers at-a-glance insights that quickly prove the results of any campaign, reflecting results from every channel. Powered by an Insights Agent, these metrics feed all future campaign recommendations and enable rapid iteration based on what works.
Marketers enter natural language prompts into the agentic AI to accomplish each of these steps. Sample prompts could include:
- Which customers are most likely to churn, and what campaign can we activate to retain them?
- What new customer personas have emerged in the past month and how can we increase new customer acquisition in this group?
- How can we optimize our return on ad spend to convert buyers on social media?
The agentic AI delivers proposed actions to achieve the expressed goals. Marketers approve the proposed campaigns, and the engine autonomously runs everything across channels and analyzes the results to inform future recommendations.
This creates a rapid innovation cycle that empowers marketers to run highly personalized campaigns at a scale never before possible. The AI delivers personalization on a mass scale by:
- Creating distinct and highly accurate customer segments
- Proposing cross-channel campaigns that reflect individual buyer preferences and shopping history
- Optimizing the timing and delivery channel for all messages
- Learning from every interaction to continue refining campaign recommendations
As a result, marketers:
- Build precise audience segments
- Build and trigger omnichannel journeys
- Personalize customer experiences
- Run campaign experiments
- Quantify marketing impact with insights and reporting
- Accelerate marketing cycle using agentic AI
- Accelerate speed of iteration using agentic AI
And data leaders:
- Activate first-party data across the tech stack
- Create and maintain Customer 360
- Enable self-serve data activation
- Retail Media Network activation
Empowering marketers to innovate
Marketers are essential conductors or orchestrators of the Compound Marketing Engine, which eliminates routine, mundane, and time-intensive tasks.
Humans can't run thousands of simultaneous experiments. AI agents can. Agents build audiences, suggest new campaigns, and measure results to fine-tune the subsequent activation instantaneously. Marketers manage the goals, approve recommendations, review results, and guide the AI to deliver better outcomes.
With AI saving time, humans are empowered to focus more on strategy than execution. And that’s where they thrive. A Compound Marketing Engine handles campaigns and testing while marketers can develop first-party data strategies, enrich their customer understanding, and develop new content to fuel the campaign pipeline.
Data is the competitive differentiator for AI
Companies have vast amounts of customer data they can’t leverage effectively. A Compound Marketing Engine streamlines the marketing workflow and activates data so every insight informs future campaign success.
A first-party data strategy is the key differentiator in the age of AI. As organizations rapidly mature in their AI strategy — and implement the right infrastructure like a Compound Marketing Engine — they can run countless campaigns and prove their results with confidence. This power will quickly separate the leading organizations from the rest.
Compound Marketing Engines are the path forward for our industry. They create better customer experiences, more strategic marketing teams, and highly successful businesses.
Welcome to the era of compound marketing.
If you’re ready to activate the potential of your data and start delivering better results immediately, learn more about GrowthLoop’s Compound Marketing Engine in our upcoming webinar on May 14.