Marketers need to move at the speed of their customers. Imagine your company has an idea for an exciting new marketing campaign to boost sales during a weekend flash sale. Everyone is aligned and excited, but execution screeches to a halt when it comes time to build the audience. 

The marketing team submits a request. The data team adds it to their long list of tasks. Then the deadline passes, as does the sale.

Unfortunately, this is all too real for many companies, especially those that are still relying on traditional CDPs or marketing clouds that wall off data. 

To truly own customer relationships, marketers must be able to build audiences as needed and have access to the freshest, most up-to-date data. 

The best way to achieve that? Build audiences on the cloud. 

The old way meant bottlenecks and siloes

For years, marketing has had to go through a long, drawn-out process with the data team to get customer segments built. 

Marketers would:

• Identify the need for a customer segment
• Put in a request to the data team
• And then wait for SQL queries to be written, lists to be pulled, and data to be validated, all so they can launch a single segmented marketing campaign. 

Aside from being inefficient and slow, this also delays strategic marketing campaigns. By the time a segment is built, the window of opportunity might vanish. 

The real issue isn’t the teams, it’s the misalignment between the infrastructure strategy set by data and engineering, and the evolving needs of marketing.

Data teams have invested in secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, but they have to ETL (extract, transform, and load) data every time there’s a request. Marketing teams are still forced to rely on legacy CDPs and activation tools that require that data, which makes it hard to innovate or experiment and optimize quickly. 

This disconnect creates delays and missed opportunities.

But there’s a better way.

Cloud-native is the future

Imagine a world where marketers can access the data they need, build precise audience segments, and launch campaigns in a matter of minutes, not weeks. That’s possible with cloud-native audiences. 

When you build audiences on a cloud data warehouse, constraints disappear. Think of a marketer who wants to re-engage high spenders who abandoned their carts during a recent flash sale. Access to cloud warehouse data makes it easy for them to build an audience for customers with over $200 in their cart and no completed purchase in the last 48 hours, in just a few minutes. And the campaign can launch that same day, when intent is still high.

With cloud-native audience building, you get:

• Fresh, accurate data - No copies or stale syncs — always work from the single source of truth.
• Security and compliance: - Keep all data in your governed warehouse environment.
• Enterprise scalability - Build and activate audiences across billions of rows without performance bottlenecks.

Audience building on the cloud accelerates the pace of marketing. It also makes data governance easier by working within your existing cloud data infrastructure, which frees up time for the data team to focus on their strategy and team goals, not just answering marketing requests. 

Cloud-native gives marketers the speed and access they need, but to truly future-proof your stack and stay flexible, you also need composability.

Here’s how audience building compares on the cloud vs. traditional methods:

Composable architecture is a must for marketers

When your customer data already lives in the cloud, the last thing you should do is move it somewhere else just to use it. Unlike traditional CDPs that require you to copy and store your customer data inside a separate platform, composable architecture runs directly on your cloud data warehouse, whether it’s Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks. 

Composable architecture empowers marketing and data teams to have:

• Flexibility - Keep your favorite tools. Swap in best-in-class options. GrowthLoop works with what you already use.
• Faster time-to-value - Go live in days, not months. Teams can start building audiences immediately.
• Collaboration - Marketing and data teams use the same platform, speak the same language, and collaborate better.

Let’s say your analytics team builds a predictive model in your warehouse. Maybe it scores customer churn risk, or purchase propensity, or product affinity. Before composable tools, that model might sit in a dashboard, gathering dust. With a composable platform, marketers can log in, use a no-code builder to use the model to launch a personalized campaign, without the data ever leaving the warehouse. 

AI advantages to building audiences on the cloud 

AI is transforming how marketers build, and optimize customer segments, but even the most advanced models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. When first-party data is scattered across disconnected tools, updated infrequently, or duplicated across systems, AI is left working with an incomplete picture, leading to recommendations that lack nuance or miss key signals. 

This is why building on the cloud is essential. A cloud data warehouse acts as a centralized, governed source of truth for AI models. AI thrives in a cloud-native, composable setup because it can analyze the complete, freshest view of each customer directly in your data warehouse and instantly turn insights into action.

By tapping into up-to-date cloud data, AI can:

• Surface patterns
• Suggest high-performing cohorts
• Continuously refine audiences as new data flows into the cloud warehouse

Cloud-native doesn’t just make AI audience building possible, it makes it powerful, dependable, and aligned with the pace of modern marketing.

The cloud-native audience builder built by marketers, for marketers

Self-serve audience building transforms the way marketers and data teams can work together by empowering marketers to build and activate audiences without needing to move or duplicate data at all. Data teams configure access and define data strategy, but no longer need to build the ETL pipelines to give marketers access to data.

GrowthLoop Audiences enables marketing teams to compound their growth by building, optimizing, and activating audience segments that drive ROI directly from their cloud data, without writing SQL or relying on data engineering.

• Eliminate batch-based data syncs like ETL.
• Directly connect to your data cloud, whether it’s BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks. 
• Organize customer, transaction, event, and model data into easy Dataset Groups.
• Use the no-code UI to build audiences with natural language, instead of SQL.
• Define rich customer segments using live warehouse data and see how many users match the criteria live. 
• Reuse templates to simplify the audience building process.
• Enable closed-loop reporting as all audience activity is written back to the warehouse.

Once you’ve built your audience, you can quickly and easily push the new audience to Google, Braze, Klaviyo, Salesforce and many more destinations. 

GrowthLoop inherits your existing data governance, plugs into your existing data and marketing stack, and evolves as your business changes.

The future is cloud-first and self-serve

The old way of building audiences doesn’t work anymore. Today’s marketing teams need data they can trust. By shifting audience building to the cloud and adopting a composable Compound Marketing Engine like GrowthLoop, marketers gain the flexibility and speed they need to grow faster.

Your data is already in the cloud. It’s time your marketing moved there too.

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