Customer data platforms (CDPs) and Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) are becoming more and more popular and many B2B organizations are investing in packaged applications or are building their own as part of their martech stack. But what are the core capabilities of a CDP and how can a CDP specifically support a B2B organization? If you’re thinking of adding a CDP to your marketing technology stack, here’s a guide to what CDPs can do and the specific role they can play in the B2B arena.
The Importance of CDPs in B2B
In its Landscape Report, New Tech: B2B Customer Data Platforms Forrester points out that CDPs are becoming more important to B2B businesses. This is because of the unequivocal benefits of consolidating data and the increasing importance of data management as artificial intelligence continues to grow and as B2B companies look to deliver customer experiences that stand out. CDPs support the kind of data management capabilities needed to progress, the report says: “By integrating and unifying first- and third-party data to create unified profiles, B2B CDPs are enabling users to improve the quality of their data, upgrade their targeting, and create more timely, personalized experiences.”
Additionally, the rise of omnichannel marketing has made delivering consistent interactions across channels a priority. Many marketers struggle with retrieving and combining siloed data to target accounts and generate insightful reports. Only 12% of B2B marketers are confident in their data quality, and 84% cite data management as their key weakness. CDPs address these issues by unifying and centralizing data, allowing for targeted messaging and better alignment between sales and marketing teams.
How a CDP Works
The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” A CDP connects, segments, and activates data points on individual customers and prospects to create a unified view. It gathers data from various sources, including sales and marketing systems, enterprise systems, transactions, support calls, chatbots, and third-party sources like firmographic and demographic data, web activity, and ad impressions. Identity resolution then matches leads to accounts, organizing this data in one place, generating segments, and enabling omnichannel one-on-one campaigns.
Key Benefits of a CDP for B2B
When viewed through a B2B lens, a CDP offers several key advantages:
1. Eliminating Data Silos
CDPs integrate customer and prospect data from various platforms that usually don’t communicate, such as marketing automation software, data warehouses, and CRMs. This integration allows sales, marketing, and customer service teams to access the same unified data. Sharing high-quality data helps align sales and marketing efforts, as each team can see what the other is working on and prioritize tasks accordingly.
2. Identity Resolution
As the B2B buyer journey becomes more complex and non-linear, identity resolution is crucial. CDPs combine all collected data into one customer profile, accurately matching and merging customer data from multiple sources. This single view of each customer can be used by marketing, sales, and other business areas, enabling shared insights.
3. Data Management and Security
With the decline of third-party cookies in 2023, CDPs help manage, collect, and store user data
while staying compliant with data protection regulations. This is essential for delivering personalized experiences in a privacy-first world.
4. Behavioral Data Collection
Behavioral data includes the granular interactions of prospects and customers with your business, collected from social media, marketing automation systems, websites, mobile apps, CRM systems, call centers, and emails. While a CRM system collates customer-facing interactions, a CDP collects and analyzes behavioral data from various sources, providing a holistic view of customer behavior and helping to understand churn and improve retention.
5. Audience Building
CDPs excel at creating segments for account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. Better segmentation leads to better targeting and audience building. A CDP can react in real-time to a prospect’s intent signals and identify high-potential customers who haven’t yet engaged with your marketing or sales team.
6. Personalization
B2B customers are five times more likely to engage with content tailored to their interests. CDPs can segment data in various ways to provide personalized experiences. For example, you could quickly create an audience from those who visited a specific product page or engaged with your live chat feature. The data a CDP consolidates is invaluable for building an ABM program, targeting ideal accounts, and delivering tailored messaging.
7. Activation
A CDP can publish user and account-level audiences to other tools in your martech stack, including email and digital ad platforms, to orchestrate real-time, personalized messaging.
8. A Single View of the Customer
A CDP provides a 360-degree view of the customer, offering valuable data for all departments. Executives can make more informed decisions, marketers can deliver more effective campaigns, and customer support agents can resolve issues faster. By gathering data from multiple sources, a CDP unifies, matches, and cleanses data into a single source, enabling better-informed marketing campaigns.
CDPs: Not for Every Business
While CDPs can transform marketing campaigns and customer interactions, they are also complex and costly. Before investing in a CDP, it’s crucial to create a detailed plan to understand your exact requirements and explore potential solutions that meet those needs without unnecessary complexity.
