A marketer’s guide through the swerving consumer path to purchase journey

Consumer marketing used to be easy. Brands could flight a well-produced advert on TV and sit back, knowing shoppers would soon be flocking to buy their product.

But digital has made things more complicated.  

Not only is there a seemingly haphazard customer path to purchase journey, buyers these days are making multiple contacts across many channels and platforms instead of buying a product after one engagement with a brand via a single channel.

From a marketer’s perspective, there are now many channels through which they need to deliver targeted and ideally personalised messages, but they’ve also collected so much data on their customers that it’s difficult to make sense of what to do with it all.

Couple this with the implementation of stringent legislation about data privacy and a move away from third-party cookies, which so many brands’ programmatic advertising campaigns rely on, and the task facing chief marketing officers is particularly daunting.

Brands now need to make a cultural shift in the way they cut, analyse and view data, breaking down the organisational silos that exist in most companies and bringing together the various departments who collect and look at data.

Fortunately, there’s an elegant solution that helps make sense of data, deals with privacy issues and facilitates better communication — a customer data platform (CDP).

A customer data platform is a piece of software that is designed to collect customer data from all the digital channels and sources marketers use. The CDP Institute describes it as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that’s accessible to other systems”.

The CDP collects and normalises first-party data before building profiles of each customer. This means it de-dupes, records and stitches information together, enabling brands to create a single customer view regardless of whether the person has engaged with them on desktop, mobile, a smart TV or IoT device.

A CDP’s ability to harmonise other MarTech systems, coupled with the customer insights it provides, is why CDPs are gaining popularity — total spend on CDPs is set to grow from $2.4bn in 2020 to $10.3bn by 2025 — that’s a compound annual growth rate of 34%. 

In its latest white paper, Rogerwilco explores the benefits brands stand to gain from CPDs, reviews some of the most common use cases, and details the questions organisations should ask their prospective vendors if they’re thinking of investing in one. 

Click here to download the white paper now >>>

This article was paid for by Rogerwilco.