Customer data platforms (CDPs) aren’t nearly as complicated as they sound. In essence, they gather all your customer data in one place so you can then integrate it into your existing marketing practices.
We spoke to Fay Miller, Marketing Director at Fospha, about the value of Customer Data Platforms and how they can help your marketing efforts. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) aren’t nearly as complicated as they sound. In essence, they gather all your customer data in one place so you can then integrate it into your existing marketing practices.
To read the full video transcript, jump here.
Content produced in collaboration with Fospha.
You need to start by working out what your highest-value marketing activities are. From there, you can focus on measuring these practices and in unlocking valuable, insightful customer data to help your marketing strategy going forward.
Fospha builds Customer Data Platforms to power Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modelling. MTA helps you understand every touchpoint involved in a customer’s journey to conversion, and helps you weight each touchpoint accordingly.
This means that you can truly focus your marketing efforts on what actually works – and understand more about what makes a customer go from being a browser to a buyer.
From these valuable insights, you can begin marketing mix modelling, where you plan your marketing budget according to which touchpoints — and channels — have the best return on investment.
But how do you begin this process? According to Fay, you should start with a problem, or a question, and look to solve it.
This may well end up prompting further questions as you begin to understand more and more about your customers. However, don’t be discouraged – going down this journey will only serve to bolster your marketing strategy and further your business’s progress.
CDPs take the legwork out of leveraging the data that’s available to your organization. Data analysis is often conducted internally with the use of analysts — however, this is expensive and time-consuming.
By using Fospha’s solution, Direct Line Group managed to save the equivalent of 500 days of their analysts’ time.
Forget Death Star-like structures — Customer Data Platforms are all about taking your customer data and putting it in one place so it’s unified. And then integrating it with the business systems you already have and the marketing technologies that you work with.
The value for you and your business is in the insights that will be created from the data that’s within your business. We want to unlock these insights to make them valuable for you.
When you look to the market and you look at Customer Data Platforms, it can get super confusing. Some of them look like they’re a massive infrastructure sell and you struggle to understand how it relates to marketing.
But it doesn’t have to be confusing, it’s actually really simple.
It’s all about starting with measurement.
What are the highest value activities that you run in marketing and media for your business?
What’s the most important?
What’s going to have the most impact for you?
We build Customer Data Platforms to power multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modelling.
Multi-touch attribution helps you understand every touchpoint in the path to conversion. And marketing mix modelling helps you model budgets and understand where they’re going to have the most impact across different channels. So it’s a really useful and actionable tool for you.
It’s all about unlocking the data to solve business problems you have within marketing or in the business more broadly.
What we tend to find happens is that clients have an initial scope of work. They want to solve a problem, and then they ask questions. And in answer to those questions, we look at more data, either from within their business or externally from the market (it might be weather, for example). And that makes them ask more questions and so the scope expands.
But the scope expands organically. Because there are questions to be answered and a business case has been created, and value and impact has been delivered to the businesses that we work with.
One client, Direct Line Group, saved 500 days of their analysts’ time.
The advice I would give to you is look for flexibility, look to solve a problem, and keep in mind your objectives and what problems you want to solve.
