In 2023, digital advertising is one of the most essential avenues marketers have for attracting customers. Getting your digital advertising and paid media right is challenging, though. Many marketers run through their digital marketing budgets and have very little to show for those expenditures.
The key to extracting as much value as possible from your digital marketing is targeted advertising. When you tailor your marketing messages based on details about your customers, you see a much higher return on your marketing investment. Specifically, a marketing CDP is the ideal tool to help with this targeted advertising and media optimization.
Here’s how to use a CDP to improve your company’s marketing efforts.
What is a Marketing CDP?
A customer data platform, or CDP, is a software tool that collects and aggregates all of your data about your customers into a centralized platform. Consider all the systems your company currently uses to collect first-party data about customers and potential customers. For example, you likely use systems to collect data from places like:
- Your company website
- The emails you send,
- Your customer support portal
- Digital ad managers
Without an additional tool like a customer data platform, the data each of those systems collect is often entirely separate. There’s no way to get a complete view of your customers because your data on them is so fragmented and isolated. As a result, this data commonly ends up in data silos — collections of data that only one business unit or department can access fully and conveniently.
Using a marketing CDP eliminates these problems by bringing all your customer data together in one place. Your teams won’t have to hunt down different data sets or go back and forth with people in other departments to understand your customers. Thanks to the customer data platform, they’ll have all the data they need unified and at their fingertips.
Though a customer data platform has applications across enterprises, marketing teams often find this technology especially useful. They can use the data the customer data platforms aggregate to implement better targeted (and retargeted) advertising for their companies.
How a Marketing CDP Aids in Targeted Advertising and Media Optimization
To use targeted advertising, you must understand who your customers are and what they want and need. The deeper your understanding of your customers, the more effective your targeted advertising and media optimization will be.
By creating unified, 360-degree views of your customers, CDPs provide the foundation you need for targeted advertising efforts. Let’s break down some specific examples of the ways a marketing customer data platform will help your enterprise’s targeted advertising and media optimization.
Audience Segmenting
No matter how broad your company’s line of products or services is, your target audience isn’t the whole world — it’s a smaller group of people. You can break down your target audience into even smaller groups based on their similarities. This process, known as audience segmentation, is the bread and butter of targeted advertising.
When you use targeted advertising, instead of sharing the same ad with everyone, you show certain people certain messages they’re likely to respond positively to. Deciding which ads should go to which people comes down to audience segmentation. Targeted advertising done right improves the audience’s response to those ads.
But how do you accurately break your audience down into meaningful segments? With the help of a customer data platform, audience segmenting is easier than ever. The CDP contains all the information about your customers that your marketing team needs to create detailed, highly-specific audience segments. You’ll never have to send out ineffective blanket messaging ever again when you use a customer data platform.
Personalization
You can also take this deep well of information about your customers to offer them a more personalized experience with your brand. And this personalization makes a big difference in a company’s marketing efforts. Furthermore, research shows that an incredible 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that provides them with personalized experiences.
The information you can use to personalize your marketing efforts with a CDP goes far beyond basic characteristics like age and gender. Using a customer data platform, you can personalize experiences based on deep, specific data like the products a consumer viewed on your website, their spending level, or their visited pages. It’s personalization on a truly individual level, which isn’t feasible without a tool like a CDP.
Multi-channel Marketing
There are many different channels you can use to reach customers these days. Between email, digital ads, social media, your website, and more, marketers have a wide variety of avenues to spread your brand messaging. The challenge is choosing the best channels for each customer.
A CDP gives you the data you need to send the right message to your customers through the right channels. For instance, you can analyze data about how certain segments respond to messaging over given channels to determine your next moves. Or, you can look at the individual level to see which channels each customer responds to the strongest, and adjust accordingly.
Take your marketing to the Next Level with a Marketing CDP
A marketing customer data platform will unify all your data about your customers from your website, support, emails, and more. When all this data is in one place, your marketing team will be ready to launch targeted advertising campaigns and optimize media for your enterprise.
From improved audience segmenting and personalization to more comprehensive multi-channel marketing, stronger targeted marketing is within reach when you use a marketing customer data platform.
Live Earth is a data analysis and streaming platform that helps you get the most out of your data — in marketing and every other area of your enterprise. Furthermore, the platform lets you visualize your own data, as well as comprehensive external data streams, making it easy to find new insight and improve operations.
Schedule a free demo to see Live Earth in action and learn more about how the platform can help your enterprise.