Customer data platforms and how they work to fuel demand generation
Demand generation may be the most crucial piece of eCommerce success, especially in B2C. The excellent business advice always points to solving a problem to make demand generation easier. It is that hard. In interviewing marketers in the field who evaluated CDP technology, the bulk of investment goes to fueling the engine, driving demand for their product.
Customer data platforms (CDP) were created to transform marketing technology to tie the different applications together and orchestrate more personalized customer experiences. Yes, getting the data to jive is totally the magic behind VIEWN. Still, it’s the value of orchestrating more personalized customer experiences to fuel and optimize demand generation for which you are looking.
Demand Generation defined
Demand generation is a data-driven marketing strategy that creates awareness of and interest in a company's offerings through technology and process. It has several components that can be employed based on the brand's business model and customer journeys. An example of a Demand Generation Strategy would be to Align Go-to-Market teams for better results. Examples of tactics to fuel this strategy include publishing customer testimonials on the website, testing new social channels, and updating the sales playbook with newer messaging. Update Shopify and social messaging based on customer values.
Coming from product management and attending associated unconferences, demand generation was explained within frameworks like Demand Metric’s Demand Generation Framework. Your traditional marketing funnel can be thought of as a demand generation framework. It also employs marketing tactics and different phases, all aimed at driving people to your product.
A true demand generation strategy accounts for every touchpoint in the customer’s journey - all the way from unknown prospect to returning customer. It leverages data in decision making to do three very key things: 1) Align your marketing and sales teams around your customers, 2) Track marketing's contribution to revenue, and 3) Drive growth from new and returning customers for your business.
Before the 2020 pandemic, Ascend2 surveyed and found that 49% of companies report that increasing customer acquisition was their primary objective. Even with shifted priorities, marketers will still focus on getting more and retaining as many customers as possible. So the focus on demand generation is both timely and relevant. Since demand generation has many components, I’ve broken up this series to talk about where to apply a CDP into more digestible chunks,
Brand Awareness and Target Audiences
Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Resource optimization to capture existing demand
How CDPs can fuel your demand generation engine
With data at the center of demand generation driving the decision-making and tactics, the CDP becomes central to fueling customer-centric businesses. The CDP Institute often sites the core characteristics of a CDP to 1. Pull data from multiple sources 2. Clean and combine data into individual profiles, and 3. Structure the data for other marketing systems to use.
I’m going to assume you already use different applications like Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Google Tag Manager, WordPress, Shopify, Amazon, Twilio, and Intercom to connect and engage your customers. We have worked with medium-sized enterprises that use all those daily. Most demand generation stacks use more than a dozen applications at a time. With customers expecting more and using more devices, the channels and means to grow demand often require the right combination of technologies to deliver the best customer experience. It is important to note that some marketing teams use extensive marketing clouds that may contain all the data in a single place, for which a CDP may not be necessary. But I’m finding that even these walled-gardens don’t have all the features marketers need to capture the customer's full view. It's a much shorter time than one would think for the walls to start crumbling.
Data fragmentation occurs when customer data gets siloed into different applications. This fragmentation leads to a CDP first challenge, connects the pieces, and delivers a single customer view. Not to put too fine a pint, but this particular challenge is enormously hard and can take time. The data needs to be clean, formatted, understood in its context. Identity management is how we organize individuals into profiles.
And once you have the profiles, the data is unlocked to produce all the exciting marketing value of effective demand generation.
Validated target audiences from customer segmentation
Engagement health in a multi-touch customer journey
Content strategy analytics to inform keywords, SEO, and sales messaging
Optimize ad buying with personalized Ads
CDPs-driven demand generation tactics where progressive change can lead to a lot of money. Validated target audiences get your marketing team working with data-driven assumptions. And understanding the segmentation within your customer database then aligns the keywords, SEO, and overall content strategy. Finally, from your customer data platform, you can activate with the personalized ads. Personalized by the channel the customer shops and with a value proposition aligned with their attitudes.
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