Highlights:
- B2B customer data platform use cases can handle structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data, storing it as-is or transforming it for data-driven marketing campaigns.
- With evolving privacy regulations, companies must ensure proper management and utilization of personal data throughout the organization.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) have emerged as a powerful ally in the age of data-driven business strategies. Thus, defining key customer data platform use cases becomes crucial while buying the right CDP and vendor for your organization. A shared understanding of the software use cases is necessary to align everyone around common goals and prioritize development.
As suitable buy-ins are crucial, finding a balance by focusing on internal resources and skills becomes important. The value of a CDP can also be exemplified to all your stakeholders by developing a proof-of-concept pilot program.
But the question is: How can a business utilize a customer data platform?
Key Customer Data Platforms Use Cases
CDPs offer versatility across industries, catering to diverse customer data needs. Explore the following use cases to define your pilot, plan a roadmap for short and long-term success, and drive data-driven processes throughout your organization’s digital growth.
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Managing and Integrating Data
For companies considering CDP adoption, collecting data from diverse channels and systems is a key capability all CDPs provide.
B2B customer data platform use cases can handle structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data, storing as-it-is or transforming it for data-driven marketing campaigns.
By establishing a unified customer data foundation, CDPs empower marketing, sales, and customer service teams to deliver personalized experiences that boost loyalty and lifetime value.
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Monitoring Your Customer Journey
With a CDP, you can effectively track your customers’ journey, understand the interactions and channels that drive conversions, and gain insights into which channels yield the best results.
It allows you to optimize your resources and focus on strategies that generate the highest return on investment for your business.
Take advantage of maximizing your customer acquisition potential with a powerful CDP.
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Preventing Customer Loss
If you notice a decline in customer interactions, it could suggest a weakening connection between your brand and the customer. However, you can identify these individuals with a CDP and deliver personalized messages tailored to their needs.
Doing so can effectively rebuild and strengthen the bond between your business and the customer, ensuring a more meaningful and engaged relationship.
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Identifying and Segmenting High-Value Audiences
Understanding and staying relevant to your consumers is essential, especially online. A top-notch CDP with built-in propensity models empowers your marketers with real-time insights on important customers, high-value prospects, and potential churn risks.
A better retargeting precision can be achieved with the connection of customer and advertising data and optimized audience-segmented customer data platform use cases.
Instead of relying on broad and generic lookalike audiences, narrowing it down to micro-audiences enables the machine learning-based algorithm to find highly accurate audiences with less noise.
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Governance, Data Privacy, and Compliance
Consumers desire data control and expect companies to prioritize consent management. With evolving privacy regulations, companies must ensure proper management and utilization of personal data throughout the organization.
CDPs empower IT and data teams with enhanced data privacy control, including access controls and permissions across teams. Integration with consent management software allows the sharing of data privacy preferences within a unified customer view.
Use cases of B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) can significantly transform the way organizations leverage customer data to drive business growth. However, successful CDP implementation requires careful planning and execution.
Keys to CDP Implementation Success
By focusing on these keys to CDP implementation success, organizations can maximize the value and potential of their customer data.
Your organization can unlock the full potential of its CDP and drive meaningful customer experiences, insights, and business growth with the following:
Step 1: Assemble and align stakeholders
Look for dedicated, progressive, diligent experts eager to dive into the project.
The team can comprise various positions, such as Customer Experience, Paid Media, B2B Email Marketing, Content, Social, Marketing Operations, Analytics/BIData, Dev/Engineering, etc.
Some of their responsibilities include:
- Chart the project goals to align with the established strategic objectives
- Identify the comprehensive digital strategy and its integration with the best B2B customer data platform
- Ensure that the digital transformation strategy corresponds with the content and the customer experiences
- Implement and manage tactics and timeframes
- Evaluate, experiment, and suggest enhancements for strategies throughout the process
The team should be adaptable and responsive, willing to adjust and refine as needed. They should embrace the idea that change is inevitable.
Once the team is formed and in sync, the final step is to educate the rest of the organization on the benefits of the use case customer data platform and how it can assist the organization.
Step 2: Collect data, establish expectations, and develop goals
To align CDP goals with business initiatives, understand the organization’s strategic plan and goals.
Assess data sources for accuracy, maturity, and quality, and identify cross-functional dependencies to understand how each team will use the CDP in their processes.
Data sources may come from multiple systems, such as websites, CRM systems, social channels, and mobile apps.
Step 3: Define the segments and formulate an identification and resolution strategy
To ensure the accuracy and quality of customer data solutions, it’s crucial to understand the identification strategy and identity resolution strategy, as large brands utilizing systems like Point of Sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) may have multiple identifiers for one person across different systems.
Conducting an inventory of marketing channels and martech stack integrations, such as ESP, search vendors, social media marketing tools, and analytics platforms, is important to understand their use in the customer journey.
Additionally, listing content, creative, resource, and budgetary needs and constraints are necessary for proper planning.
Step 4: Define the action plan
Prioritization of the most impactful outcomes is crucial due to the extensive work involved in the initial three steps mentioned above.
With numerous moving parts in the process, prioritizing the most critical aspects and executing them first can reduce the sense of being overwhelmed and maximizes success.
Now, the most exciting part is to execute the plan!
Step 5: Track, quantify, and seize the value
Keep in mind that the focus should not always be on monetary gains. It is equally important to conduct qualitative evaluations of the post-customer data platform use cases implementation phase.
Are there any operational or internal challenges that the customer data management platform is addressing? Make sure to document and share those aspects as well.
Step 6: Close the loop
This involves reporting on the overall success, linking and connecting all the actions taken back to the initial goals set.
The best B2B use case customer data platform transforms your business and gives you a competitive edge.
Conclusion
To maximize customer experiences and provide a data-driven process, organizations must carefully choose the correct customer data platform (CDP) vendor. CDP implementation requires a collaborative effort from each team to align use cases with the company’s goals.
Key use cases include data management and integration, customer journey monitoring, and identifying and segmenting high-value audiences.
Establishing goals, identification and resolution strategies, priorities, and revisiting the “why” behind a customer data platform implementation can bring optimal value and potential to customer data.
Flexibility, focus alignment, and adapting to change are crucial for execution, as the correct customer data platform use cases can transform businesses that embrace it.
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