This makes no sense. Marketing teams today are dependent on IT departments and third parties to just do their job, which is to communicate with prospects and customers effectively. Marketing needs to re-take control of these processes and become independent of technology.
Technology was supposed to make it easier to access your marketing data, but it seems even more complicated.
You’re having a hard time getting a single customer view. You need a consultant to deconstruct your data. You need IT. It doesn’t look like you can successfully segment without a developer.
Worse case, you have to buy a complicated software program that requires a crash course in programming. The big five CDP platforms seem to make things complicated on purpose and then charge you to uncomplicate it.
Now you are probably wasting your valuable advertising dollars, and your customers aren’t engaged. You have multiple streams of data sources from online platforms where everything feels like it lives in a silo. You need one single view of your customer data from all those sources across marketing, and you need to do it now.
On paper, the customer data platform (CDP) market is booming. There are close to 100 CDP vendors today, which have raised more than $2.4 billion in funding to date with a growth rate of nearly 71% since 2018.
But how do you tell the difference between a true CDP – imitators, and wanna-be’s? Not every company is a tried-and-true CDP. And then there’s the issue of making a return on your investment with a complex suite of products that aren’t meant for audience management?
The big tech black hole
Those big tech providers – Adobe, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle – aren’t native CDP platforms; they are massive behemoths with CDP as a line item in their portfolio.
Unfortunately, many marketing teams are dependent on their big tech teams to do anything. This dependency increases costs, reduces capabilities and slows down reaction times.
Tech has become the blockage, and that impacts marketing’s ability to deliver. This can be anything from how fast the marketing team can evolve messages and react to market changes with the implementation of essential marketing tools and services like CRM etc.
With all the big tech CDPs out there, marketers are under the impression that everything they do has a dependency on their tech teams. In essence, it’s where they turn to get approval to do anything. They assume they need their help or input. Any new solution, new martech capability is expected to impact tech, to require their approval and help to get setup. It needs to fit into the tech team’s roadmap schedule.
On-demand audiences
Cloud / SaaS-based solutions remove the big tech black hole and data blockages. Solutions like Audiens are explicitly built for marketing teams without depending on IT involvement.
For example, Audiens JavaScript tags can be dropped in your tag manager, link Audiens to your in-app attribution tool (like Kochava), connect Audiens with your existing Shopify account – without the need to schedule big tech projects.
Audiens automatically delivers appropriate audience segments suitable for the industry. It’s also easy to build your new audiences as you need them, anytime you want — with no tech involvement – think of it as on-demand audiences.
Your new superpower
First-party data is gold. It powers your success. When you can easily identify your biggest gold nuggets in your data quickly, you undeniably know who your top VIP customers are. And, this helps you understand typical buying patterns, which means you can replicate them. Now you have the superpower of spotting customers who are about to churn before they churn and incentivize them to stay.
You already have all the valuable information you need, but it’s buried in lots of different data silos. Pulling it all together, unifying customer identities across all the sources, identifying the target audiences, and being able to activate those audiences on all marketing channels is the best way to engage with individuals and grow success.
Onboarding data, unifying user identities, connecting marketing channels, etc., are considered complex, but that’s because that’s the way it’s been sold by the big tech, it’s a great way for them to earn lots of money. And here’s a secret, that’s not a reality when you buy a true audience manager-focused CDP platform.
Audiens helps marketing teams bypass all the red tape of IT. Our platform has a simple, one-click setup. No coding. No consultants. Quick, easy, uncomplicated so you can get on with creating inspiring marketing that engages your customers. To find out more, sign up for Audiens and retake control of your data.