If your brand is involved in any sort of ecommerce activity, then chances are you’ve heard someone talking about CDP. There’s also a good chance you’ve heard others mention the importance of first-party data in the cookie-less future. Well, most of the time, both conversations have the same key aspect at their core: useful data is being produced by people who interact with your brand firsthand. But having the possibility of harnessing that information is the key if a brand is to remain competitive in today’s market reality.

But what does that last statement have to do with CDP, you say? Well, while there are other instances in the marketer’s tech stack that can help a brand gather information and use it for many purposes, when talking about first-party data, the CDP (or customer data platform) is the more robust solution of the whole bundle. A CDP is built with the primary goal of integrating first-party data generated from all sources in existence in a way that not only can produce multilevel insights but can also be activated and utilized by multiple other instances of the tech stack, whether they are online or offline. Here are five interesting ways a CDP can power up a brand’s marketing strategy:

1. It can serve as an online/offline integration channel. When a company carries its business in both online and offline environments, such as a retail store that has both an ecommerce website and bricks-and-mortar shops, a CDP can help the business identify customers who have interacted with the brand online before closing a purchase in a physical store (or vice versa). By taking information from CRM and sales platforms, as well as other offline sources, CDPs can help marketers understand shopping behavior and possible points of contact that would help them interact with that customer in their future consumer journeys, in any environment they should happen.
2. It helps you understand true identity. There are multiple points of contact with the same person along the entire ecosystem. Whether it is shopping on a company’s websites or apps, commenting on the company’s Instagram account, or even using a discount coupon included in a purchase done physically, there’s a good chance there are multiple sets of data generated by the same user, but in different places or properties. A CDP helps you create a data model that will use rules to consolidate those separated sets of data, generated both when the user has been recognized or even when they are anonymous. Using that data, CDPs can create one unique profile that includes information from several points of contact, so you can fully visualize your customers’ journeys and intercept them accordingly.
3. It accommodates to any business’ core activity. From ecommerce to customer service, a CDP includes both plug-and-play and customizable options that allow companies to consolidate data siloes and normalize data from different sources into a cross-platform data model. All these capabilities will help any company generate complex insights, integrate machine learning developments, group deduped individuals for both targeted activations through multiple channels, and prepare data for integrated reporting, regardless of the core activity.
4. It allows for multichannel activations. Having all the data ingested and curated in one place helps ease the task of developing integrations with multiple activation points. Most CDPs have plug-ins or premade connections to most activation channels, such as DSPs, for audience-targeted media buying, email management platforms, CRM for lead generation automations and other actions. In addition, CDPs also offer strong APIs that can be used to develop integrations for more custom solutions, such as website dynamic modding or custom BI reporting.
5. It makes your marketing strategy “cookie apocalypse-proof.” When third-party cookies are gone, the two things that will survive are cockroaches and companies with a strong first-party data strategy. This is the reason why many companies are investing in CDPs right now; while most audience targeting strategies face radical changes because of the deprecation of third-party cookies pixel tracking, most first-party data-based targeting will remain the same, giving the advantage to those companies that can leverage that data and merge it with other remaining data partners in the business.

Now that the industry is on the verge of changing, companies should seize the opportunity and work on their first-party data strategy. I’ll leave you with a couple of interesting articles so you can get your feet wet learning what a CDP can do for your company. We’re here to talk about how we can help you get there.

Sources:

Oracle

Salesforce