Written by Marco Formaggio, Director, SAP Customer Experience, DXC Technology Australia & New Zealand
Marketing technology has changed rapidly in the last decade. A plethora of new tools has come to market, making it easier for businesses to amplify their brand and get ahead in the new digital economy.
These dedicated applications allow organisations to simplify and systemise routine marketing activity, but they have created a complicated technology landscape. Marketing automation solutions, social media platforms, CRM, digital asset management, marketing hubs and dashboards – the list of applications an organisation must assess, select and deploy, is long and varied.
Despite the functional breadth and depth of these solutions, the challenge of integrating and leveraging marketing architecture to improve the overall customer experience remains difficult to solve. These disparate systems deliver immense value to an organisation, but they complicate how data is collected, shared and unified. As a result, creating a holistic customer profile across all channels and devices is still an immense challenge.
In the past, system integrators have tried to address this issue by creating links between on-premise systems and migrating data to and from them as needed. However, this approach is part of a legacy technology paradigm. It is a complex and costly activity that has led to a proliferation of disparate architectures, and in many instances, the customer record remains fractured and disconnected across the organisation.
In light of the desire to achieve integrated marketing communications, it is easy to see how fractured data becomes a fundamental issue for marketers. While marketing automation tools can help organisations deliver brand messaging to their customers or prospects in a timely manner, without a comprehensive picture of the customer at an exact moment in time, the communications run the risk of being irrelevant, or worst still, just another annoying noise that the customer has to filter out.
But happily, the system technology paradigm is changing rapidly. The arrival of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) offers an attractive alternative to manage customer data.
Take marketing automation solutions as an example. A customer that implemented a marketing automation system five years ago can today purchase a best-of-breed solution purpose-built to support e-commerce activity. But re-platforming can be an enormous undertaking as the legacy platform contains all the customer interactions for the past five years.
Conversely, what would it mean if an organisation could remove the legacy platform and swap in the new one without losing data or undertaking complex and costly activities to migrate legacy data? Furthermore, imagine if re-establishing the interfaces was as easy as a few clicks, or even better, machine learning did it automatically.
Interest in CDPs has intensified because they open the door to these types of compelling data management advantages. As a result, they are helping organisations to deliver unified customer data and generating insights that can improve personalisation and increase customer acquisition.
In a recent survey (Forrester report: ‘The Quest For Data-Driven Engagement In APAC And The Middle East’, March 2021), 67 per cent of marketing leaders and 54 per cent of technology leaders agreed that building a single source of customer data is vital for driving deep personalisation and customer efficiency. 42 per cent admitted their organisations are ineffective at creating a single unified customer data profile. Organisations see it as essential to build deeper relationships with customers and turn personalised experiences into enhanced revenue gathering opportunities.
Join our webinar on 21 October to hear use cases highlighting issues with legacy approaches to implementing marketing technology. Then, learn how CDPs can help solve these problems and, in doing so, give organisations the information they need to build a unified customer profile.
This article is sponsored by DXC Technology
