5 reasons why marketers need a composable architecture for long-term success

Marketing teams constantly struggle with an ever-evolving toolset for storing and activating customer data. With over 15,000 martech tools to choose from, teams are trapped in ongoing cycles where they:

• Place big bets on their customer data foundation, like a customer data platform (CDP) or marketing automation platform (MAP)

• Seek new channel tools, rigorously compare vendors, and spend significant resources to integrate tools into their existing stack

• Struggle to achieve any tool’s promised potential, and fail to optimize their workflows or demonstrate meaningful business value

The cycle begins again as teams overhaul their data foundation or chase the next shiny solution that promises to be a cure-all. 

Teams must focus on the source of these problems to free themselves from the cycle — which starts with their customer data storage. Solutions like MAPs, CDPs, and enterprise suites offer unique advantages, but none enable rapid, seamless integration with new tools or position AI for its greatest potential. 

Composable technologies built around a data cloud are the only way to preserve your customer 360 and activate data across an ever-changing landscape of channels. 

If your team is struggling to achieve optimal workflows and focus on what actually matters — engaging customers in personalized and innovative ways, making the most of every marketing opportunity — let’s examine how composability gives you a future-proof foundation for scale. 

The challenges of legacy martech solutions

Data silos are often what stops teams from delivering cohesive, personalized campaigns.

Solutions like traditional CDPs and enterprise marketing suites have aimed to solve data fragmentation and create unified, measurable workflows, but they have instead presented new challenges:

• Complex integrations to orchestrate activities

• Manual, time-intensive reporting processes

• Vendor lock-in that restricts flexibility 

Well-intentioned technology leaders have tried to build secure and effective tech stacks, but most investments have gone to waste. 

Marketers now face more pressure than ever to deliver better results with fewer resources. We’ve reached a critical inflection point where teams must implement AI, and it performs best at the highest customer data source (instead of relying on the features of any given channel tool). Marketers also need to freely swap tools in and out as they see fit, while preserving data integrity. 

Composability is the path forward. 

What is composable marketing technology?

First-party data fuels marketing success. Every customer insight brings teams closer to delivering highly personalized omnichannel experiences.

But data has historically been trapped in siloed solutions or restricted by manual processes that fail to enable real-time updates and analysis.

Composability in martech refers to an ecosystem where individual tools can connect seamlessly to constantly preserve data integrity and activate data across all outreach channels. 

The enterprise data cloud is central in a composable ecosystem because it serves as the sole data storage location that all channel tools feed into. Composable solutions empower teams with full freedom to remove and implement tools as they deem fit, without losing customer intelligence or needing complicated developer support. 

An orchestration layer or composable audience and journey builder connects to the data cloud to give marketers an intuitive interface to work with their customer data. 

Add tools. Remove tools. Orchestrate complex omnichannel journeys. Implement AI where it is most powerful. Composable solutions give teams flexibility and agility to keep pace with the rapidly evolving tech landscape. 

Why composable architecture is the only choice for marketing success

Every organization is currently invested in some data solution, whether it’s a marketing cloud, CDP, in-house solution, or packaged suite. It’s natural to hesitate on reworking these data foundations, considering the time and money teams have invested in them.

The hard truth is that many existing solutions will never deliver the experience and agility teams need. Traditional CDPs are obsolete, despite being central to innovation in the last decade. Enterprise suites offer robust all-in-one solutions, but often come with 18-month implementations, sky-high price tags, and channel tool lock-in. 

Your technology investments aren’t all for nothing. Many tools can fold into a composable ecosystem, and you can coordinate the data across all those tools using an orchestration tool or a composable audience and journey builder, such as a composable CDP or Compound Marketing Engine. 

There are five specific reasons why a composable architecture connected to a data warehouse is the future, providing the necessary foundation for long-lasting growth:

1. Self-serve data access for marketing

Can your team easily build audiences and report on campaign success? This process often requires engineering or data team support, which creates a critical bottleneck for agility.

Composable architecture ensures all customer data and campaign insights live in a central location. Unlike disconnected channel tools that store fragmented insights, data clouds can connect to solutions with intuitive interfaces for marketers to access the complete insights and functionality they need to develop campaigns. 

A composable audience and journey builder makes it easy for marketers to create audience segments and orchestrate campaigns across channels, all based on the single source of truth in the data cloud. These platforms also analyze campaign performance alongside customer data in real-time, so teams can implement changes while campaigns are still running. 

2. Integration with channels that fit your customers and strategy

Customer channels are constantly changing, as are the channel tools we use to orchestrate campaigns. 

Composability means marketers can plug and play any number of tools that fit their strategy to reach customers or monetize their customer data, like in a retail media network. Composable architecture stays resilient as channels and tools change, because all data is stored in the data cloud, and it’s all orchestrated with one tool — such as a composable CDP or Compound Marketing Engine. 

A team can swap its email marketing, advertising, or SMS platform without losing campaign insights. This empowers teams to constantly assess their stack and find the solutions that provide the greatest benefits — like unique features, ease-of-use, and greatest convenience to move campaigns forward.

3. Data security

Data security is a critical risk for organizations, as breaches can cost millions of dollars and irreparable brand damage with eroded customer trust.

Storing data — especially sensitive customer information — across disparate channel tools greatly increases your likelihood of a breach. Traditional CDPs require teams to copy their data into the platform to use it across tools, which poses a risk to security (as well as data accuracy).  

Composable architecture circumvents this issue by storing data in the heavily guarded data cloud, which is built with security measures that channel tools can’t match.

The data cloud provides optimal data security and adherence to evolving data privacy regulations. It extends security benefits by providing only a window of necessary data to channel tools for specific campaigns, without requiring teams to provide full customer data or sensitive information. For example, a social media advertising team targeting a specific region would only upload information relevant to that exact campaign in that region, without sharing irrelevant data. Robust user access controls provide even more defenses against data breaches. 

4. Long-term scalability and cost effectiveness

When a data cloud fuels all channel tools, it greatly reduces your individual channel tool costs and eliminates data duplication. 

With a composable architecture, the orchestration layer is the core location to build audiences and campaigns, so teams can rely on lower-cost subscriptions to any channel tool. Most tools now offer AI capabilities, however, AI is most powerful when it accesses the most complete set of customer data (which is in the data cloud, not a channel tool). 

Teams do not need robust features in the channel tools because they’re often covered by the data cloud or the orchestration layer, and they do not need to pay for duplicative storage. 

5. Optimal for agentic AI

AI needs access to the most complete and accurate customer data set for optimal analysis and performance. If teams apply AI at the channel-tool level, AI makes recommendations on fragmented and possibly outdated customer details.

When AI is applied to the data cloud, which is the single source of truth, it can access all business intelligence to make highly accurate recommendations that understand the full nuances of your customers and your organizational goals. This is how AI can truly serve your organization as an advisor — quickly analyzing data, surfacing recommendations, and guiding marketers toward the right path to achieve specific organizational goals. 

As agentic AI capabilities evolve, a composable ecosystem means AI can access every downstream system and orchestrate activities autonomously, instead of facing roadblocks at every disconnect between tools. 

Compound marketing growth is built on composable technologies

Composable martech gives marketers a foundation to constantly refine their channel tools without sacrificing data security. They can implement new technologies at ease and hit their stride on any channel faster than relying on engineering support to stitch solutions together.

The self-service capabilities coupled with powerful AI insights empower marketers to launch, test, and iterate campaigns faster than ever. And they can measure campaign results reliably to focus efforts where they drive the greatest business value. 

This ecosystem also enables compound marketing growth, in which teams can deploy, test, and iterate personalized campaigns faster to improve and grow results quickly. With the Compound Marketing Engine as the orchestration layer, marketers can:

• Build highly accurate audiences faster with AI, which understands nuances in customer data

• Orchestrate omnichannel campaigns with ease and implement changes based on real-time performance

• Improve strategies through experimentation and A/B testing to quickly learn what drives business results 

This means marketers can activate campaigns faster, extract learnings when they still matter, and pursue more campaign opportunities at scale. 

GrowthLoop’s Compound Marketing Engine is built for composability, allowing marketers to activate first-party data and apply AI to iterate campaigns faster than ever. Learn more about GrowthLoop and book a demo today.