How many is quintillion? Good news; we have a tremendous amount of data about consumer behavior. Targeting and reaching customers with the perfect message at the perfect time should be a breeze, right? Bad news; IBM estimates that 2.6 quintillion bytes of consumer data are being generated every single day. At any given moment, consumers are interacting with brands via multiple touch points across various data collection points, channels or silos. Due to the complete disarray of all the customer data, much is lost, making it is impossible to get a complete view of our customers.
No data left behind With all of these potential touch points, it is more important than ever to reach our customers with a seamless and personalized message sent at the perfect time. Wouldn’t be great if we could use ALL the information from our website, 3rrd party sources, CRM, ad server, and offline marketing to communicate with our customers perfectly? Brands need continuity, a great customer experience and a message that resonates. A recent e-marketer survey found nearly 50% of tech developers, marketers, advertisers, publishers and marketing service providers view these silos as a hinderance. Furthermore, they believe dissolving these silos would be a tremendous value and would increase sales within their organizations. At Mapp Digital, our customers have found that our customer data platform (CDP) can collect all the fragmented data that is potentially lost and create a seamless customer experience with their brand. Finally, we get a 360-degree picture of our customers!
Data and the weather Let’s take a look at some previous solutions created to dissolve those silos:
1.Data Lakes: all the data integrated into one place in its native format, but disorganized and unfiltered, bobbing around aimlessly. Requires a lot of IT work to become actionable and unified into a customer view. A solid use case is when a CDP ingests a data lake.
2. Data Warehouse: create master records, require heavy normalization for complete customer view. Difficult to manage, marketers need to reach out to a database team in order to access new pieces of data. This is inconsistent and cumbersome as it pertains to when and how you can access your data.
3. Marketing Cloud: lacks behavioral data, does not connect all marketing tools and has limited channel access, making the view of your customers cloudy and unclear.
Up close and personal CDP can consolidate and integrate customer data into one platform, getting rid of those silos and allowing marketers to access their customer’s data all under one roof. You can create a personal experience for your customers to keep them coming back for more. This is great for keeping our current customers happy, but how do we leverage these insights to reach new customers? The CDP unifies these customer profiles and makes them more manageable, thus allowing us to predict the optimum next move with our customers and helps us understand the best way to win new ones.
Industry Analysts agree… Forrester and Gartner have each recognized CDPs as a tool that fits a growing need of today’s marketers. They too believe that CDPs should focus on activating first-party data and should be a self-service tool for marketers. It is important to call out the distinction between a CDP and a DMP, data management platform. Gartner states, “DMP negotiates programmatic advertising while CDP is grounded in individuals known by name, email, or another personal ID.”
Mapp out your customer’s journey In the end, the CDP will give you the most complete view of a customer that can be provided right now. All the customer data will be in one place, providing you a clear map of your customer’s and potential customer’s journeys. Mapp is at the forefront of the evolving CDP definition. We see the market heading in the direction of native execution capabilities within a CDP. Mapp is able to do this through a unique combination of a marketing cloud, DMP, and CDP, which together equal the Mapp Cloud. This creates a virtuous cycle in which actionable insights are garnered from both known and unknown channels, those insights are executed via marketing campaigns, and the results of those campaigns feed the insights to develop the next campaign.
To learn more about Mapp’s CDP and watch the replay of this webinar, play the video above or click HERE.
If you’re ready to see a demo of how Mapp Digital can help your company, email hello@mapp.com.
This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
