Artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, augmented reality and metaverse: technology is transforming our daily lives and opening up frontiers for business that were unimaginable until recently. We are increasingly hyperconnected, informed and aware, but, in the eyes of brands, also much more elusive and elusive. Capturing the attention of consumers today requires considerable effort and strategies that can no longer disregard their in-depth knowledge and the ability to preside over every microphase of their customer journey, thanks to the use of tech solutions such as Customer Data Platforms.
We have already addressed this topic in numerous articles on our blog: we have understood how a data-driven marketing and business approach has become imprenscible today to build a company’s competitive advantage.
But how best to manage the enormous potential of such an approach? If creativity and strategy remain core values, technology supports them by enabling their maximum expression. Welcome to the world of martech, among countless technological solutions to support your marketing strategy.
In today’s article, we will find out the main ones while keeping our eyes fixed on Customer Data Platforms, which we discussed in depth in a dedicated article.
Customer Data Platform VS CRM: way to personalize the customer experience
CDP stands to marketing as CRM stands to sales: if we wanted to simplify the peculiarities of CRM and CDP and relate them with a mathematical proportion, this would be the best one.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was created as a tool designed to support the management of the relationship with the actual and potential customer, as it is specified in its wording.
In fact if we wanted to be more precise, we can see that iI CRM is also used as a repository of data inherent to suppliers and other supply chain actors. Data and information pertaining to multiple business departments, from marketing to finance to sales to customer care, are collected and organized here.
The goal is to create detailed profiles that can be useful to the sales force in ringing up the customer, whether already active or potential.
While the Customer Data Platform thus provides a clear snapshot of the user’s entire customer journey and enables the implementation of activities aimed at intercepting the user at the different touchpoints, CRM is moreover a “registry” repository that needs the support of other tools in order to “operate” the data it collects.
But let us delve into the peculiarities of both solutions below, comparing them regarding particular topics.
- Scope of application: if CRM collects data involving interactions with actual and potential customers and originated as a support to the sales force, CDP can be seen more as a tool to support strategy. It collects data on anonymous users, and non-anonymous users, from multiple sources, enables their analysis in order to deploy effective profiling and segmentation strategies for personalizing the online and offline customer experience.
- Type of data: within CRM, mostly the following are collected first-party data, usually entered manually. CDP is, on the other hand, able to collect and normalize data from multiple sources, updating it in real time in order to better map user behavior.
- Customer journey mapping: if CRM is unable to recognize the user at different touchpoints both physical and digital and to aggregate and connect data from multiple sources, CDPs enable tracking of user interactions across different channels. All this enables data orchestration activities aimed, not only at mapping, but also at actively intervening in the user’s customer journey.
- Management and use of the tools: the CRM presents itself as a rather complex tool that requires rather complex management, often entrusted to the company’s IT department. CDPs, on the other hand, are born with the aim of being user-friendly and easily usable by different company departments, marketing in primis, and offer functionalities that, although characterized by complex implications (think of the different activities of profiling and dynamic segmentation) turn out to be, in the eyes of users, easily implementable. Recall, finally, that on the activity side to be implemented CRM needs additional modules.
CDP VS Data Management Platform: different data, for different purposes
The martech world we know is always evolving: new technological solutions become established, others die, and still others evolve.
This is the case with Data Management Platforms, better known as DMPs.
Established in the first decade of the 2000s primarily to support media buying activities, over time, these too have evolved to collect not only anonymous data, such as cookies and IP addresses, but also nonanonymous data from multiple sources.
Many believe that today’s CDPs can be considered, in part, as an evolution of the older DMPs, but perhaps it is important to keep the areas of use of both of these solutions distinct.
Beyond data collection, what in fact has always characterized a DMP is its use in advertising: if Customer Data Platforms are effective tools to support your all-round marketing strategy, DMPs allow you to collect and analyze data and information to optimize your ADS campaigns. Here then, DMPs thus enable companies to create profiled targets for ADS campaigns and unearth new potential customers, while CDPs, simplifying, are mostly about their users.
But how does a DMP work in more detail? Let’s find out together:
- aggregates mostly digital data, such as cookies, behavioral data, and similar audience information. Off-line data and data from CRM can be integrated with external ad hoc solutions and cannot be collected natively;
- segments the collected data allowing the creation of real audiences of users with similar interests and characteristics that can be used for more targeted ADS activities and campaigns;
- analyzes and optimizes the audience data created in order to enable optimization of active campaigns. Optimization but not only that, the goal of a DMP is also to enable marketers to make more informed buying decisions and the ability to more effectively target future campaigns as well.
CDP, CRM, DMP but more: a look at data warehouses
Among the technological solutions present in martech, we cannot forget the data warehouse, storage systems for large amounts of data from multiple sources. Here, data are structured and normalized in order to make them available to different business functions. While CDPs essentially collect data inherent to users and aimed at reconstructing their customer journey, data warehouses usually have the functionality of enabling complex analysis and informative reports. Moreover, once collected here, the data are not updated in real time, but periodically, and this contributes to making them poorly effective technological solutions for implementing customer experience personalization strategies.
So many technological solutions, different objectives and varied areas of use: in reality, as is easily understood, there is no one solution better than the other.
A company’s choice must be thoughtful based on the needs to be met.
Data is increasingly a key asset for successful strategies, so it is important to choose what enables us to collect, analyze, and operate it in the easiest ways and in the fastest time.
