First to the party: Building a first-party data strategy

5. Technology

In today's fast-moving world picking the right tech can be the difference between a runaway success and company failure. How do you ensure you get your technology stack right?

All hands on tech

Do you have the technology to get started, or need to invest for success? This section will talk you through just that.

Here's what you need to consider to deliver your first-party strategies and ensure your technology is working most efficiently.

5.1 Auditing your existing technology

5.2 A best-practice technology stack

Customer Data Platform
ID Solutions
Data Management Platform
Marketing Automation Platform
CMS and Personalisation Platform
Analytics

5.3 Thinking steps ahead

5.1 Audit your existing technology

Before you can get started implementing a new technology stack, it’s important to involve your wider teams to audit your existing martech stack.

This will mean aligning with sales, product and support teams. Many of the platforms we’ll discuss in the following sections will require integrations directly from your existing sources.

While it is technically possible to completely overhaul your tech stack, it’s not something we recommend, as it’s likely that your business already has many of the required building blocks in place. This audit also doesn’t need to be time-consuming, but it is important to get it right.

Top tip: It can be useful to use a flow chart that’s based on your typical customer lifecycle to identify which groups of martech platforms are influencing specific stages of the customer journey.

Once you have collected your data, you can classify and organise your platforms into groups. Exactly how you decide to classify your tools will be unique to your organisation, but there are a few guiding points you may consider.

Which of your digital tools…

Help with lead generation and new business?
Contains existing customer data?
Contains identifiable users and which are anonymous?
Are used to activate data rather than collecting it?

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

We recommend that your Customer Data Platform (CDP) should be the foundation of your first-party data strategy. This tool will help to organise all of your customer data that’s held across your existing teams and platforms and store it all in one place.

A CDP will take in customer and prospect data from existing sales and marketing systems to your CRM, but also extends to connected platforms including your helpdesk, product or apps and any other useful data sources including advertising and marketing platforms. All this data will be unified in one place, which makes it easier to query.

Why not use an existing CRM platform?

Unifying all of your data in one CRM platform is possible, but it will require a huge number of custom fields and development work in order to be successful – it’s also likely that this will result in a performance impact across your sales teams.

Meanwhile, purpose-built CDP platforms can ensure all your data is reconciled, operating alongside your marketing sources while also loading data from your existing CRM. An effective CDP will integrate with your existing sources straight out of the box, immediately providing you with more control over your data with no custom development required and no impact on your sales teams’ system of record.

Additionally, by removing the silos between your existing platforms you’ll be able to build better, more accurate, attribution models, further proving the value your marketing activity is having on creating pipeline and revenue for your business.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

The B2B Difference

Many CDP platforms will be focused on a typical B2C audience, treating each visitor and prospect individually.

Segment – the market leader in the CDP typically treats visits this way. In B2B however, we typically focus on “accounts” or businesses as our main point of contact, bringing together individuals and their roles as part of a buying committee during a long sales cycle.

It's important to ensure your chosen CDP supports this relationship-driven model – without this, you may not be able to support your business's ABM objectives – and in the worst case – you may even create frustrating experiences for your prospects.

What else do I need to consider when selecting a CDP?

Once you have completed the audit of your martech stack, you should have a list of “sources” where information is collected, and “destinations” where the information is used to activate marketing campaigns.

Once again, including sales, product and support teams in this process can provide valuable input. This understanding of your data sources and destinations can be used to draw up a shortlist of CDP providers, based on their native integrations. Avoiding any custom development work will keep the implementation quick and efficient, allowing your teams to get to value quickly with your chosen CDP.

Other tools, such as persona and audience segmentation should be considered, as ensuring the correct fields can be filtered will be vital to your teams’ agility and their use of the platform.

Continued...

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

... Each CDP may provide value-add functionality, such as GDPR compliance tools, or “replay” functionality. Consider your team workflows and assess whether these would be valuable for you. For instance, if your team has a test-and-learn mentality, the ability to “replay” previously collected data against your destinations may prove useful as you test new advertising networks or analytics platforms.

Finally, if your chosen provider(s) include training, or better yet, industry-specific setups and templates, we recommend you start there – ensuring your organisation has the best foundation prior to getting started on this journey. According to the CDP Institute, the time and skill of marketing staff is often the biggest obstacle to the utilisation of customer data. And, contrary to what some may expect: often the largest barriers are not technology or budget, but organisational readiness and change management.

Where to get started?

A good starting point could be to read this Forrester report (December 2021), which compares the relative strengths and merits of the 14 most significant standalone CDPs:

Acquia	ActionIQ	Adobe
BlueConic	CaliberMind	Dun & Bradstreet
FirstHive	Leadspace	Lytics
Oracle	Tealium	Terminus
Twilio	Upland Software

Have you…

Identified your data sources and destinations?
Shortlisted CDP solutions that meet your requirements?
Determined whether custom development work is required?
Considered “nice-to-haves”, such as persona and audience segmentation?
Researched additional functionality, such as GDPR tools and “replay” modelling?
Assessed the benefits of training and educational programs?

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

ID Solutions

As well as a DMP, it’s important to consider what will be the new data “currency” of these platforms. User-enabled IDs can provide one potential currency, offering a 1:1 view of the user – as with third-party cookies.

Using these, advertisers can expect to target and measure their campaigns in a very similar way to now. These solutions aim to enable cross-site tracking, based on identifiable information, which users have opted to provide.

There are two main types of ID solution: Authenticated and Non-Authenticated.

An Authenticated ID is an identifier based around “hashing” an email address – encrypted using a one-way token to be compliant with privacy laws – and can be a powerful tool for activating any first-party data based on emails.

The second type is a Non-Authenticated identifier. These are extremely similar to how cookies work today: they are deployed on a website via a tag in the page code. This tag can drop an identifier on a browser in a way that doesn’t require third-party cookies.

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

Data Management Platform (DMP)

Whereas CDPs are used to target and grow existing customer relationships with first-party data, Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are primarily used to acquire new customers through third-party data. Previously, CDPs would often be considered an “internal” DMP.

Some people may wonder: if you have an existing DMP – why would you need both?

The answer is, as previously discussed, that the third-party data landscape will change significantly within the next few years as the underlying unit of data (the cookie) is deprecated. It’s therefore advantageous to have both a CDP and a DMP in your marketing mix. This will ensure that you’re collecting your own first-party data, and activating it, using your DMP to provide a robust inbound marketing funnel.

By integrating both platforms, you can utilise your DMP’s third-party data to target existing customers and then, depending on the platform, you can create models that target look-a-like audiences of new prospects. It’s also important to consider whether your CDP and DMP can be linked with your preferred data enrichment platform – this will save significant manual effort, and unlock the efficiency of automation when being used for both marketing and sales.

Your DMP does not need to be owned. Instead, you can look to integrate and use agency-based DMP platforms, which can provide significant scale to your campaigns. Choosing the right CDP will make these integrations seamless and – even more importantly – they will be fully privacy compliant.

Feeling overwhelmed with business acronyms?

If you need a refresher on the terminology, don’t forget we’ve included a glossary here.

ID Solutions

There’s no single solution that will tick all the boxes, therefore brands need to look at what they are trying to achieve with their first-party data and ensure they have the necessary tech stack to deploy it in a way that aligns with their goals.

As you build your technology stack, ensure that you’re collecting the right information – and of course consent – for use in the ID platforms that may be anticipated in the future.

Without this all-important data it will not be possible to target your prospects. This is the best solution to ensure that you're ticking boxes for customers and independent bodies.

User ID solutions:

Offer stricter controls around privacy than third-party cookies, e.g. a centralised hub for users to manage their preferences and a transparent opt-out process that can be activated at any time
It may be independently governed, meaning that all participants must agree to and adhere to a code of conduct
Although offering a reduced number compared to cookies, will be of a significantly higher quality – verified against email in many cases

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

Marketing Automation

Your customer data wouldn’t be much use without methods to activate it and start generating pipeline, so it’s no surprise that a marketing automation platform should be a key part of your technology stack.

There are many guides available elsewhere for choosing such a platform, so we’re not going to go into a huge amount of detail here, however, it will be key to choose a platform that integrates natively with your CDP. This will simplify updating profiles and activating your customer data based on its segmentation and lists.

Integrating your Marketing Automation with other advertising providers, Google Adwords for example, will be less important as ideally this data would be fed back through your chosen CDP. Centralising on your CDP here is the most effective way of ensuring a complete and up-to-date view of your customer, and avoids duplicate records being created.

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

CMS and Personalisation Platform

Integrating a CMS platform into the rest of your marketing stack will not only allow for rapid page and content creation; it will also allow for your customer data to be used to augment your personalisation efforts.

Many CMS platforms will have a personalisation function built in, take Hubspot, Sitecore and AEM for example. Meanwhile there are other, cheaper alternatives, such as Wordpress, which rely on plug-ins to personalise pages. Whichever option you select it’s important to ensure that the data you’re collecting can be used to personalise pages, while also considering your potential traffic sources.

Many sites rely on integration with your email marketing or form-fills to achieve personalisation, while others allow for behaviour-driven or IP-driven approaches, which enable personalisation even when faced with anonymous website traffic. To determine the right solution for your business, mapping out your expected user journeys will help to narrow down your options.

Benefits of a standalone personalisation platform?

Depending on your choice of CMS, it may also be necessary to pick a dedicated personalisation platform. This can offer a few key advantages over a bundled solution:

Avoid vendor lock-in
Add extra personalisation features
Enable A/B and multivariance testing
Enhance flexibility with interoperable solutions

5.2 Creating a best-practice technology stack

Analytics

Analytics is a key part of any marketing technology stack. Without a trustworthy, reliable analytics tool, you can’t measure the success of your campaigns and marketing activity.

However, many analytics platforms (including GA3) are now seeing drop-offs in excess of 40%, as the market moves away from third-party cookies and websites are required to ask for consent prior to dropping the tracking pixel.

We suggest you use this opportunity to explore server-side or privacy-first analytics tools, each of which takes a different approach:

Server-side

These analytics tools collect data at the log level on the server, no longer requiring cookies. These are the most reliable, however they lack the ability to track users across multi-devices or connections, and may undergo additional scrutiny if they rely on user IP addresses for identification, which can be classified as PII.

Privacy-first

GA4 is the first among a new wave of “cookieless” client site analytics tools. Google aims to move to a privacy-first model – where consent is no longer required and machine learning is used to complete gaps in tracking. This may seem the easiest route, but analytics will be less reliable than with server-side methods, especially when sample sizes are small.

5.3 Thinking steps ahead

Depending on where your business is in its growth journey, you may have already broken down your data siloes, performed an audit of your data, or integrated your platforms using a DMP. For now, these steps would put your business ahead of the curve in terms of innovation. But what comes next for those blazing the trail? And what will that mean for the businesses that have yet to catch up?

Looking to the future, having combined and consolidated all of your available data will make it easier to train powerful machine learning and AI tools. This will allow you to produce more accurate forecasting and attribution models alongside your marketing. This could also enable a range of additional predictions and use cases, for example combining additional data from sources such as your helpdesk could be used to predict customer support cases and mitigate escalations way in advance.

Intelligent, predictive models are becoming ever easier to deploy – so expect an explosion of vendors into this space throughout 2023 and beyond. There are even some businesses, such as Google, that are already using ML to complete gaps in their data brought on by privacy and consent guidelines.