What is compound marketing?

Compound marketing is a new marketing approach that drives rapidly compounding growth by accelerating marketing iteration using agentic AI powered by first-party data.

What problem does compound marketing solve?

Compound marketing solves a problem for every marketing organization: slow iteration and growth. Every business iterates on its marketing. Meaning, it changes strategies over time and learns from the results, good or bad. 

This marketing cycle varies across businesses, but it often includes: 

• Identify audiences

• Create customer journeys across various channels

• Set up campaign creative 

• Run campaigns

• Measure results

• Learn from the results and refine the next round of campaigns

The problem is that this process is very hands-on. It requires:

• Manual data pulls

• Manual audience selection

• Manual journey building (if at all)

• Manual campaign management

• Manual results analysis

Manual marketing cycles often take months or quarters to run.  

But with compound marketing, teams have fewer manual steps and more speed. That means marketing results can grow the way investments grow, with compounding returns that build day by day. 

What’s the benefit of compound marketing?

As a financial adviser might say, compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world. If you’re talking about a savings account, there’s a big difference between interest that compounds 1% annually and 1% daily. 

The same concept is true in marketing. The faster the iterations, the faster the growth. 

The impact can be huge:

• A 1% gain per quarter equals 104% growth per year.

• 1% per week = 168% per year

• 1% per day = 3,778% per year

Gains like this have been unreachable to date because the processes involved have always required human intelligence to make decisions, launch campaigns, and review the results. But with compound marketing — powered by a Compound Marketing Engine — agentic AI can handle these tasks and complete them faster (with marketers setting goals and approving each step). Meanwhile, marketers can focus time on more strategic areas that drive the business. 

What is a Compound Marketing Engine?

A Compound Marketing Engine powers compound growth by speeding up the marketing cycle. It combines agentic AI and first-party data to make decisions, launch campaigns, and analyze the results.

It’s an enterprise solution that operates on an organization’s existing data cloud, like Google Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, or Amazon Redshift. 

Using the enterprise cloud as a single source of truth, the Compound Marketing Engine can:

• Learn from first-party data

• Predict the best audiences

• Predict the best customer journeys

• Get approval from marketers

• Run cross-channel campaigns

• Analyze results to inform future audience and journey suggestions 

How does a Compound Marketing Engine work?

A Compound Marketing Engine starts by connecting directly to an organization’s first-party data in the enterprise cloud. That means it has access to the most accurate and relevant customer data, business data (like sales and profitability), and marketing data (like past campaign performance). 

The platform then uses this data to predict the audiences, journeys, and channels for best performance. It can make these recommendations proactively or generate them based on natural language prompts from a marketer. 

The Compound Marketing Engine then connects directly to marketing platforms like Google Ads, Meta, Braze, or any other platform with an API. That allows it to:

• Optimize campaigns holistically across channels

• Upload data directly to marketing platforms

• Trigger updated campaigns on marketers’ behalf

Finally, the circle is closed: The Compound Marketing Engine ingests campaign performance data into the data cloud, where the engine will use it to make further improvements to audiences and journeys.

An important component of the Compound Marketing Engine is that marketers always remain in the loop. The platform presents its ideas, and marketers can accept them, tweak them, or create their own audiences and journeys. Marketers always have full control.

What’s the difference between a Compound Marketing Engine and a composable CDP?

A Compound Marketing Engine is the next evolution of the composable CDP, built for the modern data stack. It delivers the same outcomes as the composable CDP, and more:

• Instead of storing and centralizing data like a traditional CDP, it activates and orchestrates it directly from the cloud

• AI agents powered by first-party data give marketers superpowers, helping them build precise audiences, launch personalized journeys, and easily optimize campaigns

• Because everything runs directly in the cloud, agents continuously analyze performance and deliver intelligent recommendations for rapid improvement

How does a Compound Marketing Engine benefit marketing and data teams?

A Compound Marketing Engine helps entire organizations by accelerating growth. Two teams within the organization benefit in particular: the marketing and data teams.

Benefits for the marketing team

A Compound Marketing Engine helps marketing teams:

1. Accelerate the marketing cycle

2. Decrease the manual work required at each stage

3. Improve the results at each stage

Leading marketing teams use a Compound Marketing Engine to:

• Activate first-party data. It powers agentic AI with customer, business, and marketing data to maximize results.

• Create precise audience segments. It quickly creates and refines hyper-targeted audiences from real-time data.

• Build and trigger omnichannel journeys. It designs sophisticated, multi-channel experiences that launch and optimize automatically.

• Personalize customer experiences. Based on customer behavior and historical data, it delivers the right message at the right time.

• Run campaign experiments at scale. It tests, measures, and iterates faster to identify high-performing strategies.

• Quantify marketing impact with insights and reporting. It analyzes audience health, campaign lift, and overall ROI in real time.

Benefits for the data team

A Compound Marketing Engine helps data teams:

1. Unlock the full value of their cloud investments

2. Reduce manual processes

3. Ensure that their marketing operates on secure, real-time data

Leading data teams use a Compound Marketing Engine to:

• Activate first-party data within the data cloud. It unlocks structured data held in the data warehouse, so marketing can use it securely and compliantly.

• Build infrastructure for their organizations’ AI strategy. It ensures AI models are trained on the most accurate first-party data, creating a scalable foundation for AI-powered automation, insights, and decision-making.

• Create and maintain a unified customer 360. It continuously updates customer records and marketing performance data, ensuring that every new audience and journey is powered by an accurate and reliable golden record. 

• Enable self-serve data activation. It gives marketing the ability to build and launch campaigns without data team dependencies.

• Activate retail media networks. It can monetize first-party data by enabling precise audience targeting for brand partners.

How does a compound marketing engine compare with alternatives?

A compound marketing engine replaces a CDP (customer data platform) or the CDP component of a marketing suite.

Here are the differences between a compound marketing engine and a CDP or marketing suite:

Traditional CDPs + marketing suites Compound Marketing Engine Data access and scope Limited to the data explicitly copied from the cloud, resulting in incomplete datasets and restricted workflows that require engineering resources. Directly connects to data clouds like BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, and Amazon Redshift, providing access to all data without duplication. AI agents Relies on static AI models that lack flexibility and adaptability to specific business needs. AI agents work from the enterprise data cloud and real-time performance data. The agents suggest audiences, journeys, and next best actions for upcoming campaigns. Audience building Relies on siloed, outdated data that doesn't reflect real-time customer behavior, leading to misaligned segments and ineffective targeting. Data teams often have to pull audiences for marketers. Marketers leverage real-time audience building powered by cloud-native data and assisted by an agent that pinpoints hyper-relevant segments for every campaign. Journey orchestration Limited to the channels the platform supports, not the channels that fit your strategy. Requires engineering support for new channels. Marketers build omnichannel journeys with agents based on historical data, customer preferences, and your campaign objectives. Reporting and insights Marketing teams rely on data team support to pull metrics or must go to each individual system or channel to analyze insights. Agents ingest real-time performance data, analyzes trends, and uncovers revenue-driving opportunities to fuel continuous improvement. The agent then delivers actionable campaign suggestions for marketing teams to review and approve. Compound growth Limited reporting and siloed workflows slow iteration and campaign improvement over time. When your data cloud uses agentic AI to connect audiences, journeys, and campaign results, real-time iteration, and compounding improvement, become a reality.

How to be future-proof with a Compound Marketing Engine

The marketing industry is moving towards AI at every stage of the marketing cycle, driving efficiency and growth.

As marketers evaluate technology, it’s important to ensure that today’s decisions can reach this future. A truly AI-powered marketing cycle requires three key features:

1. Agentic AI must operate on the data cloud – providing secure, comprehensive and real-time access to first-party data, for maximum effectiveness.

2. Agentic AI must operate across all platforms and channels – providing holistic orchestration of audiences, journeys, and campaigns.

3. Agentic AI must operate across the whole marketing cycle – allowing it to collect results and optimize further.

AI solutions that only make decisions for parts of the marketing cycle will not reach the ultimate destination: a marketing cycle powered by AI throughout, with the benefits of rapidly compounding growth. 

Learn more about Compound Marketing Engines

If you want to learn more about the benefits of a Compound Marketing Engine, join us for an exclusive webinar on May 14.