Digital transformation has been one of the most oft-referenced and widely implemented business trends of the last 20 or so years, and chances are it’s a phrase you’ve heard once or twice at your organization. The phrase has gained a renewed energy over the last few months as the COVID-19 crisis has forced many organizations to quickly alter how they conduct business, and in some cases make drastic changes.
Early digital transformation projects were means for organizations to upgrade their technologies and systems to better compete in an increasingly digital world. But nowadays, digital transformation has evolved to be an organization-wide endeavor that updates not just technology, but also business strategies to be more agile in the face of constantly-changing business and consumer trends. Today, this means an increased focus on data-driven processes and an embrace of digital and online channels.
If you’re a seasoned marketer, chances are you’ve experienced some level of digital transformation at your organization at some point over the last few years, particularly given changing trends in consumer purchasing habits and customer engagement. This effort (or perhaps efforts) likely added new technology to your MarTech stack to help make your marketing more data-driven and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. But if this effort didn’t equate to more customer-centric marketing and improved campaign performance, it’s likely because achieving a unified customer view was overlooked as part of the process.Here’s a look at why a unified customer view should be a key consideration during any marketing-related digital transformation project and what you can do to quickly and easily achieve and maintain this view at your organization.
Achieving a unified customer view requires the right technology
Plainly put, a unified customer view is critical for marketers because it ensures that you're operating with the most accurate understanding possible of your customers. There are three major benefits to a unified customer view:
- Improved insight into customer behavior and lifetime value
- Improved customer analysis and segmentation
- Improved results using your existing technology assets
This enhanced understanding of your customers (both individually and at-scale) then helps in a number of campaign planning and execution areas, such as channel prioritization and messaging personalization, both of which are now essential components of a successful modern marketing strategy.
Of course, a unified customer view isn’t something that just happens at the snap of your fingers (sorry Thanos). It's achieved through the unification of your customer data into individual customer profiles, which requires integration of the various systems where customer data is collected. You must then of course make sure these profiles are continuously updated with new data that you collect, otherwise you're working with outdated information that can potentially ground your campaigns before they've even had a chance to hit the runway.
But the sheer complexity of marketers' tech stacks today makes system integration exceedingly difficult, and can require major IT resources to accomplish. This can add unforeseen costs and implementation time to your project, creating a snowball effect that puts strain on your entire organization and potentially leaves you in a worse position than when your project began.
With the right technology added to your MarTech stack, however, these customer data unification and marketing system integration headaches can be avoided and can almost immediately deliver you the unified customer view you need to make your marketing campaigns a success.
A CDP is the ideal tool for marketing's digital transformation
A customer data platform (CDP) like the one offered by us at QuickPivot is purposely designed to integrate with the various systems you already have in your MarTech stack, requiring only minimal IT involvement to implement and subsequently maintain. CDPs are built to help marketers corral the troves of customer data you have and unify it in one easy-to-use and easy-to-access system. This eliminates data silos and data inaccuracies, and makes achieving and maintaining a truly unified customer view simple and pain-free.
But what makes a CDP the ideal technology to consider as part of a digital transformation is that one can be added to your stack at any time with little to no disruption of ongoing operations and with no need to replace or remove any existing systems. This means that no matter where your organization is in its digital transformation journey, marketers can immediately reap the many benefits that CDPs have to offer on top of a unified customer view: simpler customer data management, more accurate and informed data segmentation, and more effective, data-driven marketing campaigns.
Want to learn more about how the QuickPivot CDP fits into your digital transformation plans? Reach out at hello@quickpivot.com or request a demo using the link at the top of this page.
