First-party data is the future of marketing, an indispensable resource that brands need for success. BlueConic, Inc.'s Tech Talk showcases key points to help you get started.
Tech Talks is our video series that brings together innovative marketing technology providers to talk about their offerings, what are the challenges it can help marketers overcome, the value it can add to a business, and more. Our latest Tech Talk features BlueConic, Inc., a leading customer data platform (CDP) that centralizes all your first-party data and helps you overcome the silos, and create individualized experiences in every stage of a customer’s lifecycle.
BlueConic, Inc.’s Director of Product Marketing, Sam Ngo talks about how the CDP is used to gather valuable insights about your customers from across all your different marketing platforms. That unique view of a customer is then available to marketers wherever and whenever they need it for marketing activation.
Large companies like Netflix, Google, and Amazon all have one thing in common – they have access to their first-party data, giving them a considerable advantage when it comes to knowing their customers.
Before we dive in, here’s a little detail on first-party data, here’s some brief information on first-party data.
First-party data is the data you’ve collected directly on your audience via owned, earned, and paid media. In fact, first-Party data is so valuable that on a post on Think With Google, they mention that:
“Leading marketers are 58% more likely than the mainstream to strongly agree that first-party data is a strategic asset that informs their decision-making.”
You can then analyze the data and use it to attract and retain successful customers effectively.
While a customer data platform is a great tool and something that everyone should be using, it’s important to remember that a CDP is not something that will do all the work for you. For example, they can’t launch a campaign for you, but they can help make sure that your systems are using the most accurate data. This accurate data enables you to know where to focus your efforts and which customer segment should receive which marketing material.
First-party data allows you to see where your customers are in their journey, which enables you to create tailored experiences for them. It is a crucial part of marketing, yet it is either out of reach for most businesses, or they are not made aware that this data is possible to obtain. This is where BlueConic, Inc. comes in.
BlueConic, Inc. was founded in 2010 and has been growing ever since. Today BlueConic, Inc. has about 100 employees with over 300 customers from Hearst, Moyen, ING, T-mobile, and many more. While they work with lots of different companies across different industries, they are best suited for enterprise and mid-size companies that want to get control over all their data across different marketing systems.
To quickly discover the amazing offerings BlueConic, Inc’s got, view their Tech Talk below:
BlueConic, Inc. serves as the perfect partner that serves you these valuable insights and the ability to make real-time changes from a central location.
BlueConic, Inc.’s CDP helps you better understand your customers, giving you the ability to gather historical data, identify behaviors, as well as track product interests which can all be used to create dynamic customer segmentation. Creating and building dynamic, multi-dimensional segments that update in real-time has never been easier.
These unique customer segmentations allow you to create different micro-segments based on product interests and product browsing. Once you have created these segments, you can use that data to create and target personalized ads on platforms like Google and Facebook that, in turn, will be more likely to be clicked on.
BlueConic, Inc.’s CDP helped Goba Sports Group lower CPC and increase their return on ad spend by 59%.
They are focused on understanding their holistic customer from the time that they were a prospect to the time they become a customer.
They set up micro-segments based on a user’s product interests and product browsing and sent all that data to Google and Facebook to create a very personalized Ad for the user. This approach has worked out very well for them as they have seen a return on their ad spend increase by 59%, and the cost per acquisition reduced to 24%.
Goba was also able to eliminate the need for a secondary business intelligence tool that they were using. Their primary reporting tool is Google Data Studio, so by adding BlueConic, Inc. into the mix, they were able to use BlueConic, Inc.’s connectors to various data and then send that report and data to Google Data Studio. This newly created set up allowed them to consolidate their technology stack.
BlueConic, Inc.’s CDP (customer data platform) gives marketers the ability to do everything in-house without having to use different departments or even another agency and therefore cuts down the amount of time it takes to build out segments. Having all your data in one place and not having to rely on different manual processes and platforms to gather and process all the data allows you to do those time-consuming things quickly, precisely, and efficiently.
Now that marketers can do segmentation on their own without having to involve IT teams or analytics teams, it drastically reduces the time it takes to build a segment. You can then also reuse the same segment across all of your systems in just a few minutes. This gives time back to a marketer and changes how they do their job.
Instead of relying on all those manual processes, BlueConic, Inc.’s CDP gives you the ability to move on with your day to do something else, like focusing on creating better marketing segments that will move the business forward without being bogged down by all those daily processes.
BlueConic, Inc. is set up to integrate with your entire marketing technology ecosystem right out of the box. What this means is that the system allows you to connect, unify and activate first-party customer data from all of your different data sources from all of your various accounts so that you can get all your first-party data in one location, such as:
No matter where you get your data from, BlueConic, Inc. has a connection to help you gather all your data in one place so that you can build out a unique customer profile that you can then use to create your custom user experience.
If you do not see a tool that you are currently using, you can always ask to have that tool added to their connections by filling out this form.
CDPs help with the ability to make your other systems more intelligent. The CDP will help make sure that your systems are using the most accurate and complete data to help you make those crucial decisions. CDPs can make other processes more intelligent as it relies on retrieving the most useful data.
While a customer data platform is a great tool and something that everyone should be using, it’s important to remember that a CDP is not something that will do all the work for you. For example, they can’t launch a campaign for you, but they can tell you who should receive each campaign and which campaigns to suppress based on customer behavior. Unlike legacy technology, all changes with BlueConic, Inc. can be done in real-time.
By taking all your data and having it in one place, you can make sure that the right customer is seeing the right campaign will have an impact on how customers will perceive your brand.
BlueConic, Inc.’s powerful customer data platform allows you to build a single customer view for marketing, acquire high-value customers, deliver engaging experiences, retain, upsell, and cross-sell existing customers. This is what makes customer-centric marketing possible at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Implementation is not the same for everyone and will depend on your use case and what you are looking to achieve. Whether you want to start with segmentation, modeling, analytics, or customer lifecycle orchestration is really up to you. BlueConic, Inc. allows you to move in any direction you’d like. Once you figure out what data you want to put into the CDP and how you are going to use that data, you will then have the ability to test out different use cases depending on what your business needs are now and what they will be in the future.
Being able to understand what people want and accurately anticipating customer needs is critical to growth. BlueConic, Inc.’s CDP is a great tool that allows you to gather your customer data in one place so that you can use your first-party data to build custom user experiences that target your customers throughout their journey.
Remember, first-party data is a top choice for driving customer engagement and insights. Better customer experiences require better data, and BlueConic, Inc. provides unified, actionable data for marketing.
Michael McManus is CMO and SEO Director for SignatureWEB.
