Do me a favor. Take a second and count how many different tools, apps, systems, and platforms you use to track your customer’s journey.
It’s a lot, right?
And you’re not alone. A quick look at the marketing tech stacks that companies submitted to the 2018 Chiefmartec.com Stackies Awards shows that most operational marketing tech stacks are made up of at least a dozen components.
On the one hand, it’s amazing that we live in an age where you can piecemeal the perfect setup from many different providers. But on the other, unchecked tech stack complexity often creates data silos that unintentionally hinder core marketing activities like:
- Reconciling a comprehensive customer journey
- Identifying how channels perform individually and holistically
- Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing activities
- Analyzing how to optimize marketing budget
This is a common pitfall on the path to executing real people-based marketing—the technologies and data needed to do it can actually be a huge impediment if they’re not carefully connecting your data internally before using it externally.
That’s why tech stack integration and data desiloization is critical to the right message/person/time/place process—to truly understand who you’re speaking to, you first need to understand how their data is dispersed across your tech stack.
Piecing together identities
Crafting a people-based marketing strategy when you don’t have a full picture of the person you’re marketing to means you are missing out on an opportunity to improve your customer experience.
The trouble starts when you’re working with data that’s not tied to a single, persistent identity. You’re marketing to a fragment of the customer’s wider journey.
So when one of your data sets shows that the person you’re targeting is really interested in a specific product, it makes total sense to promote that product to them, right?
Absolutely. Except that another data set might show that they’ve actually already bought that product offline or in some other capacity.
Now if you had reconciled those two data points, you could suppress ads for that product and push ads to upsell complementary products or services. The same interaction goes from being unnecessary and unwanted to feeling like a delightful, relevant customer experience.
And ad suppression is only one application of a people-based marketing strategy built on a foundation of robust identity. At every touchpoint, regardless of the channel, there are rich use cases for what happens with robust tech stack integration.
But without it, people-based marketing is functionally impossible.
A truly integrated identity
But let’s be real for a second. Integrating your tech stack isn’t always as easy as manually reconciling data between a few different spreadsheets. If it was, you wouldn’t be reading this.
There are a number of different methods, ranging from hands-on data integration, to pestering IT for an API-based manual workaround, through to using a full-blown professional services integration partner.
They all work in some regard, but they’re not efficient. They’re time consuming, money-sucking, and they aren’t people-based.
But there’s another way.
A privacy-conscious way to bring together all the data from across your tech stack, while also resolving the identities of the consumers within it into a single, complete, people-based view.
Identity resolution combats tech stack disarray, unlocks the true value of your data, and maximizes the potential value of your disparate systems into a coherent, interlinked function.
In practice, it supports your people-based efforts with an omnichannel view, connecting billions of relevant touchpoints to your customer’s profile, so you know what to say, when, and to whom. This helps you not only measure the efficacy of your marketing, but also evaluate where to distribute ad dollars based on performance.
In this interactive piece, you’ll find out what’s causing tech stack disarray, why addressing it matters, and how identity resolution can help. Find the use case relevant to your role, and see how identity resolution could help you unlock the true value of your data.