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How CDPs Help Build a Healthy Intent Data Ecosystem

The digital landscape and B2B intent data ecosystem is constantly evolving, and one emerging sector in this data-driven world that’s going to be a game changer is B2B customer data platforms (CDPs).

The essence of B2B CDPs revolves around data democratization, data unification, data management, and data analytics. CDPs serve as a packaged application approach and help deal with the challenge of access to quality data and insights. Built from first-party data sources, CDPs provide users with a unified view of customer profiles enabling them to fine tune targeting initiatives, improve data quality, and create more personalized and timely buyer experiences.

Empowering B2B tech marketers and tech buyers alike

CDPs will play a crucial role for marketers looking to build a relevant target audience, coordinate engagement, and measure performance. By providing a “unified” view of customer profiles with marketer-managed centralized access, CDPs enable marketers to optimally utilize and consolidate data for targeting, orchestration, and personalization efforts that support omnichannel marketing campaigns.

CDPs also help solve challenges of IT professionals and other tech buyers by enabling them to manage data ecosystems more effectively, improve data quality, and ensure data compliance based on data privacy and regulatory changes. One of the biggest challenges of data professionals is customer data management, and CDPs help to streamline data platforms by managing data flows between different marketing systems and centralizing customer data infrastructure. This eliminates data silos and gives users more control over data. Moreover, with access to actionable insights derived from real-time data, IT professionals can inform decision makers faster, ensuring more productive and profitable outcomes.

Adopting a privacy-first mindset while continuing to deliver data-driven experiences

While there’s still another year before the “death of the third-party cookie”, companies are looking for alternatives – because all third-party data collected prior to May 2018, that doesn’t have GDPR-compliant consent, becomes useless.

As the intent data landscape evolves, there’s a shift to leveraging first-party intent data and building change-resilient strategies. The key advantage of CDPs is that they are built on first-party data and allow users to share consent updates, enabling them to use only consent-based data. Ensuring compliance with GDPR and other privacy and data regulations, CDPs are a great way to future proof intent data ecosystems and keep a privacy-first mindset while continuing to deliver data-driven experiences.

Leveraging first-party data with CDPs

CDPs, driven by first-party data, are sometimes confused with data management platforms (DMPs) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. While DMPs mainly serve advertising requirements by collecting anonymous, short-lived, cookie-based data, CRM solutions help to build stronger customer relationships and typically do not gather or analyze data from disparate data sources. The biggest disadvantage of DMPs is that they are based on third-party data, while CDPs are based on first-party data sources and address the challenge of compliance with GDPR and other privacy and data regulations. Furthermore, as CDPs maintain real-time data of customers, information gathered is more reliable and accurate, allowing marketers to create tailored campaigns and increase marketing effectiveness.

Keeping up with the evolution of CDPs to customer intelligence platforms (CIPs)

In 2022 and beyond, we are going to see more privacy regulations and data policies enforced. CDPs are best placed to adapt to the evolving digital landscape and intent data ecosystem. Whether you are a B2B marketer or a tech buyer, CDPs deserve consideration because in addition to giving a unified view of customer profiles, they democratize access to data, consolidate data silos, and streamline data platforms.

The way forward in the evolution of CDPs is CIPs – which are platforms that combine first-party and third-party intent data, and incorporate AI and analytical capabilities. Using machine learning to create predictive models and recommendations, CIPs go a step further than CDPs. By mapping and analyzing customer data across multiple channels and touchpoints, CIPs produce customer intelligence. These powerful insights will enable customer-facing teams to deliver more superior experience and offer more opportunities to marketers to refine their omnichannel attribution strategies.

Intelligence-driven marketing strategies will need to adapt to intent data ecosystems that will continue to evolve. One way to keep up with changes is to stay updated. Check out our B2B marketing predictions for 2022.