Picture this: you're the marketing director at a B2B telecom powerhouse, coordinating a complex multichannel campaign to launch your company's new cloud communication platform. It's like running a marathon while juggling – emails are flying out, social media is buzzing, and website traffic is surging. Unfortunately, you're navigating this course without a clear map of your customer's journey.
You're not alone. HubSpot's 2024 The State of Marketing Report found that 31% of B2B leaders don't have or aren't sure if they have the data needed to reach their target audience effectively.1
Do you know if the same clients engaging with your emails are interacting with your social ads? Is that spike in website visits connected to your latest email blast? Without a cohesive view of individual-level customer behavior across every channel, you're essentially running blindfolded through an obstacle course.
Enter the customer data platform (CDP), your high-tech navigation tool for the B2B marketing world. In this blog, we'll explain what a CDP is and how you can use it to strengthen your B2B tech marketing strategy.
A customer data platform collects, unifies, and activates customer data from different sources to create a single, comprehensive view of each customer. For B2B tech companies, a CDP might integrate data from:
CDPs aren't just data warehouses – they're dynamic systems that continuously update and activate your customer data across all your marketing channels. The primary functions of customer data platforms include:
A CDP collects data from customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, web analytics tools, mobile apps, social media, customer support tickets, and more.
It then goes to work, cleansing, deduplicating, and stitching together all the data to create unified customer profiles. This process involves sophisticated identity resolution techniques to ensure that data from different sources is correctly attributed to the same customer, even when identifiers vary across systems.
CDPs are designed to integrate with your existing marketing technology stack using pre-built connectors and APIs. This integration capability ensures your valuable customer insights don't remain siloed within the CDP. Instead, they can be activated across all your marketing channels and customer-facing systems for consistent and personalized customer experiences at every touchpoint.
A whopping 94% of marketers say personalization helps them boost sales.2 The right customer data platform should provide a 360-degree view of each customer, enabling you to deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale. You can segment audiences based on behavior, preferences, and lifecycle stage, allowing for highly targeted messaging.
The real-time nature of CDP data also allows for dynamic personalization. For example, you can trigger relevant offers based on a customer's latest actions, tailor product recommendations based on their browsing history, and optimize campaign timing based on their engagement patterns.
Customer data integration (CDI) is the process of combining a company's customer data from disparate sources into a single, unified view. It's the foundational capability that powers CDPs, enabling them to create a holistic picture of each customer.
CDI involves collecting data from multiple touchpoints throughout the customer journey. This data collection typically includes online customer interactions like website visits and email opens, as well as offline touchpoints such as in-person meetings or phone calls. The integration process then cleanses and standardizes this data, ensuring consistency across sources.
The most important aspect of CDI is identity resolution – the ability to accurately link different data points to the same customer, even when they use different identifiers across these various systems. This might involve matching a customer's email address from your CRM with their cookie ID from your website analytics tool.
The end result of CDI is a persistent, unified customer profile that updates in real time as new data comes in. This living profile serves as a single source of truth about each customer, powering personalized experiences and informed decision-making across your organization.
Customer data integration is essential when you're trying to piece together a comprehensive view of your customer journey. Without integrated data, you're stuck logging into a dozen different systems, downloading way too many reports, and spending hours cleaning and combining data just to get a clear picture. By the time you've created a unified report, you're ready for a nap, not strategic analysis.
Customer data integration saves you from this tedious process. It unifies your data upfront, allowing you to skip the legwork and dive straight into analyzing your customers and crafting informed marketing strategies.
But saving time and brain power isn't the only advantage CDI offers B2B tech marketers. Integrating customer data can also help you:
Customer data integration tools eliminate the data silos that plague many businesses. No more toggling between your CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools to piece together the customer journey – with CDI, you get a holistic view of each account and contact.
This unified view enables more effective cross-functional collaboration. Marketing can easily share customer insights with sales, while customer success teams can quickly access a client's full history. The result is a more cohesive customer experience and more efficient internal operations.
Only 68% of B2B marketers say they have high-quality data on their target audience.1 By consolidating customer data from multiple sources, CDI helps identify and resolve data discrepancies, duplicates, and gaps to build more accurate customer profiles you can confidently use to drive decisions.
Marketing teams that prioritize data quality often enjoy more precise segmentation, more accurate reporting, and more reliable predictive models. Better data quality also reduces the risk of making costly decisions based on flawed or incomplete information.
Because CDI provides a comprehensive view of each customer's history and preferences, you can personalize customer engagement activities across marketing, sales, and support touchpoints. This creates a more seamless, consistent experience for your B2B buyers.
For example, imagine a customer reaching out to your support team after engaging with several of your marketing campaigns. With integrated data, the support rep can immediately see the customer's recent interactions and tailor their response accordingly, providing a more helpful and contextually relevant experience.
Integrating data gives you visibility into the full customer journey, making it easier to attribute conversions and revenue to specific marketing touchpoints and campaigns.
This enhanced attribution allows you to measure ROI accurately across channels and campaigns. You can identify which touchpoints are most influential in driving conversions and allocate your marketing budget more effectively as a result.
Different data integration tools use three main approaches to integrating customer data: consolidation, propagation, and federation. Here's what these involve:
Each data integration method has pros and cons, so choosing the right one will depend on your specific needs, existing infrastructure, and resources. Many organizations end up using a combination of these and applying the best method for each use case or data type.
How do B2B tech companies actually leverage CDPs? Let's explore some common ways a customer data platform can show up in your marketing operations:
CDPs allow you to move beyond basic demographic targeting. For instance, you could create a segment of mid-size healthcare companies that have recently invested in cloud infrastructure and engaged with your content on data security. This level of granularity enables highly targeted, relevant marketing campaigns.
Effective retargeting is more than simply showing the same ad to everyone who visits your site. With a customer data platform, you can tailor your retargeting ads based on the specific pages or products a prospect viewed, their engagement level, and their position in the buying cycle.
A customer data platform integrates data from all touchpoints to let you see the entire customer journey in detail.
This holistic view helps you identify where prospects are dropping off, which channels are most effective at moving customers through the funnel, and where there might be gaps in your marketing or sales process. With these insights, you can continuously refine and optimize your customer journey.
CDPs analyze patterns in customer interactions, behavior, and product usage to help you identify customers who may be considering leaving before they actually churn.
With this early warning system, you can intervene with targeted retention efforts. You might offer additional training, provide extra support, or reach out with personalized offers to address potential issues and reinforce the value of your solution.
Customers expect more effort than simply adding their company's name to an email. With a CDP, you can personalize based on their technology stack, industry challenges, engagement history with your brand, and even the topics their employees are researching – a must, considering 77% of B2B buyers won't purchase without personalized content.3
For B2B tech providers employing ABM strategies, CDPs can be a game-changer. They provide a 360-degree view of each target account, including key decision-makers, engagement history, and potential pain points. This comprehensive insight allows you to create hyper-personalized outreach and content creation.
A CDP can help you spot customers who might benefit from additional products or services in your portfolio.
For example, you might notice that customers who heavily use a particular feature of your software tend to upgrade to a more advanced package within six months. You can use this insight to proactively offer relevant upgrades or complementary services to similar customers, increasing your revenue per account.
CDPs analyze patterns in behavioral data to predict future actions. This capability is invaluable for lead scoring, allowing you to focus your sales efforts on the prospects most likely to convert. For instance, you might find that customers who download a specific white paper and attend a webinar within 30 days are more likely to make a purchase.
Excluding certain segments from acquisition campaigns can help businesses optimize ad spend. You can use a customer data platform to ensure current customers don't receive ads for products they already own or that recently churned customers aren't targeted with generic acquisition messages.
Targeted suppression not only saves you money on wasted ad spend but also improves the customer experience by ensuring people don't receive irrelevant or potentially frustrating messages.
A customer data platform can help you create a cohesive customer experience by ensuring consistent messaging and timing across all touchpoints.
For example, you could set up a campaign that starts with a personalized email, follows up with targeted social media ads, and then triggers a sales call if the prospect shows high engagement.
A CDP can aggregate usage data from your product or platform to provide insights into which features are most popular, where users might be struggling, and how usage patterns correlate with customer satisfaction.
These insights can help your product team prioritize feature development based on actual usage data. They can also inform your customer success strategies, allowing you to reach out to customers who might need additional support or training.
A customer data platform can help you predict customer lifetime value, which determines the customers likely to provide the most value over time.
This prediction can inform several strategic decisions. You might choose to invest more heavily in acquiring customers who fit the profile of your highest-value accounts, or you might tailor your retention efforts to focus on keeping these high-value customers happy.
It's easy to confuse customer data platforms with other data management solutions like DMPs, CRMs, data warehouses, and data lakes. But while all these tools have their place, CDPs are the standout players when it comes to creating a unified customer profile and activating that data across your marketing channels.
For B2B marketers aiming to deliver personalization that resonates, a CDP is usually the best choice. Let's break down the biggest differences:
Data management platforms are like digital advertising assistants. They're great for targeting ads to specific audience segments, but they're mainly top-of-funnel tools. Unlike a CDP, DMPs can't provide a comprehensive view of known customers across all your channels and touchpoints.
CRMs are great for managing sales relationships and storing basic customer info. However, they typically don't integrate data from multiple sources or provide the real-time, cross-channel activation capabilities of a CDP.
Think of a data warehouse as a repository for all your business data. It's a powerhouse for business intelligence and reporting, but it lacks the customer-centric focus and the ability to activate data across channels in real time that make CDPs so valuable.
Data lakes are the flexible storage solution of the data world. They can handle any type of data, but you need considerable technical expertise to extract meaningful insights. Unlike CDPs, they don't offer out-of-the-box capabilities for creating unified customer profiles or activating data across channels.
Customer data platforms are the essential equipment that can transform your marketing efforts from adequate to exceptional. By unifying your customer data and providing actionable insights, CDPs empower you to create the kind of personalized, seamless experiences that turn prospects into loyal customers and advocates.
However, implementing a CDP requires strategy, expertise, and a deep understanding of the B2B tech landscape. That's where Mojenta comes in. With our 14+ years of experience in the telecom, IT, and cloud industries, we know how to optimize your data strategy for peak performance.
Ready to whip your customer data into shape? Book a consult with the Mojenta team today, and let's put your customer data platform to work.
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