Today’s businesses need to market their products and services online in order for them to grow. Successful digital marketing requires skill, technology, and creativity. One of the most important tools for any business today is a customer data platform (CDP), which means understanding what it is and how to use it is crucial for any business.
1. What Is CDP?
A CDP is a powerful tool with many components, but in its simplest terms, it is an integrated database that houses customer information from all sources. In other words, CDP in marketing enables your marketing teams to collect data about each customer which allows you to personalize outreach, be strategic with your campaigns, and monitor the results. Personalization is the key to all digital marketing success. People are used to receiving advertisements that are relevant to them, from clothing stores they’ve been browsing at, restaurants they’ve been looking up, and websites that show ads for items similar to the ones they’ve already been shopping for. They are less likely to continue engaging with brands who they feel haven’t been helpful, and having a CDP helps you understand your customers, and personalize your approach when interacting with them.
2. Proactive Customer Relationship
By collecting data in a way that lets you use it without any technical know-how, a CDP enables you to understand your customers and their interactions with you, which is a big deal. This helps you to have more proactive relationships with them, so you know what they might be looking for next from your business before they even ask. When CDP is used in marketing, you can offer your customers relevant information and products. It will not only help you create more relevant content for them, but it will also potentially save you money due to highly targeted marketing campaigns. For example, if customer A looked at a specific product and then they receive an email from your business with that product, customer A is most likely going to be more receptive to it than they would have been had you sent them a mass email about completely unrelated items.
3. Understanding Customer Loyalty
Having access to knowledge about how customers interact with you helps you know where you are succeeding, but it also helps you to know where you are failing. With CDP, you can measure how often your customers are engaging with your business and what draws them in. This means that if there’s something that isn’t working for your company, either a product or service, then you can learn about it instead of wasting time on items that don’t matter to your customers. You can also use this information to study what makes a customer loyal, and then do more of that. The same goes for how well your advertisements are doing. A customer data platform allows you to assess all advertising campaigns and hone in on those that perform the best. The power of CDP in marketing doesn’t mean you have control over every area of your business, but it does give insight into how well your company is doing overall.
4. Digital Marketing Teams
Marketing teams are able to collaborate more easily when using a CDP because it gives them access to the same information about their customers. Instead of having to email spreadsheets back and forth, updating information all the time, everyone has access to the same facts. This enables teams to make decisions quickly without having to gather as much information from each other. Making the most of your efforts is crucial for digital marketers, and having one place to go ensures you can track what’s working and what isn’t. This way every decision within the platform can be data-driven which helps with goal consistency, whether it’s about an ad campaign or understanding customers better.
5. Strategy Development
A marketing strategy, to put it simply, is creating a plan and tools for what your company wants to accomplish. Digital marketers need tools that are going to enable them to determine what their goals are, and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals. With a CDP at the center of an integrated marketing strategy, it’s possible to get data from customers who have used different channels throughout their customer journey with your business. Using the data about the customers you have to establish different profiles can help you reach out to a wider audience. Customer profiling means that you group the different data you collected and use it to create one or a few profiles of sorts, and then see what pains and gains for each of them are. For instance, profile A would be a middle-aged man with a high income and profile B would be an elderly woman who is retired and living on a fixed income. By looking at what the people that potentially fall under those profiles want, need, and could be interested in, you can create a marketing strategy that will reach out to people in a similar situation, and CDP can be used to make profiling much easier and effective.
Customer Data Platforms give digital marketing teams access to the information they need so that they can see how their company is doing, and what their customers want. With this kind of information, it’s possible to create and test your campaigns and determine which ones will be most effective in reaching certain types of people. Being able to do these things means you can create an integrated marketing strategy, allowing you to reach people through various channels and grow your business even further.
