Today’s martech stack has quite a few essential support beams that a marketer must include to stay relevant to prospects and customers, meet them where they are, and maintain a competitive edge.
One key underpinning of any marketing foundation must be managing consumer data, which inform the customer insights that enable marketers to make wise decisions. Customer data platforms (CDP) and data management platforms (DMP) both accomplish this, but in different ways to different degrees, and there are key differences between the two platforms that marketers should know as they assemble their technology stack.
Basics of a DMP
DMPs were originally created to focus digital advertising on the most relevant audiences and to identify new potential market segments. They do this by using anonymous cookie data across broad digital advertising ecosystems to capture event info, such as user visited website, user visited X page. They collect, categorize, label and count this information through tags, APIs and uploads. DMPs package that information and sell it to companies to inform digital marketing. As more information comes in via cookies, the information becomes more accurate, as such the information is further refined and then repackaged. Remember, all this consumer information is completely anonymous.
What a DMP can do for you
With a DMP, you can see trends that help you create content that is more engaging to a particular segment. For example, with a DMP you would be able to tell that 44% of people who watch videos at least four times in the last week were women, 52% were 18 to 24, and 42% were watching videos related to travel.
With this information, you know more about how to cater to this demographic – videos about vacationing in Spain with a coupon for 10 percent off when booking through your travel company.
But as you can see from this example, the information is in aggregate and anonymous. DMPs cannot help you with deep personalization.
DMPs do not store personally identifiable information (PII,) which means they don’t share emails. Additionally, the applications of information from DMPs are limited to website and online advertising optimizations .
What is a CDP?
The limitations of DMPs have led to the evolution of the next generation platforms – CDPs. A CDP brings together aggregate and specific information, and provides deeper, richer information to marketers. CDPs tie together your internal customer databases to include customer history data, and mesh that information across many channels for a complete picture of your customers’ footprints.
We should address the mess in your closet – all of your customer data. Most companies have this information in several different silos that often don’t connect, and if and where they do connect there are security concerns, because integration points can be a point of security weakness. Furthermore, those different databases have different fields that don’t line up, and even if they do, the information isn’t entered all the same way (e.g., AL vs. Ala. vs. Alabama), not to mention typos. A CDP unifies all of your databases, and serves as the single source of information for the rest of your martech stack.
In addition to this data unification, CDPs also activate your customer data for use in other marketing systems in your martech stack. This gives your customers a more personal experience not just on a website, across other touchpoints as well. For example, customer data in your CDP can be segmented into audiences for Facebook, Google and Twitter campaigns, letting you personalize your content to foster better customer engagement and brand loyalty.
With the GDPR taking effect in May 2018, marketers will need to be especially diligent and responsible about managing customer information securely. A private CDP such as Velocidi’s gives you full control over your data treatment procedures, fostering transparency and privacy. It’s built as a private, on-premise deployment with strong security, eliminating potential points of weakness that exist when you rely on multiple connections for data sharing across marketing software solutions.
Bottom Line: Today’s sophisticated marketers are using CDPs to get closer to their customers and facilitate more strategic, personalized, omni-channel experiences.
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