Marketing Data Platforms: The new powerful tool to track customer preferences

CDPs, CRMs, CPMs, CTRs. No one can accuse martech stacks with lacking acronyms for various tools and metrics, and that was just some of the Cs. Today, we are delving into yet another acronymous technology which, though doesn’t begin with C, but is being viewed as indispensable in helping marketers track and attract the all-important Customer.    

“Marketing Data Platforms (MDPs) are emerging as powerful tools that complement Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and other data tools in the marketing ecosystem. MDPs help organizations centralize and leverage their data for more targeted, effective, and data-driven marketing strategies,” reveals Gopa Menon, Head of Digital – Mindshare South Asia.

Abhimanyu Vyas, Business Head of Havas’s MarTech arm, PivotConsult, says that Marketing Data Platforms serve as a central hub for brands to seamlessly consolidate data from various sources, including advertising, analytics, and transactional sources.

“They bring together data from owned, earned, and paid channels, allowing brands to forge a unified, comprehensive view of their marketing landscape. This consolidated data serves as a valuable resource for generating marketing insights, refining campaign strategies and product offerings, making informed pricing decisions, enhancing user experiences, and constructing finely tuned audience segments,” he says.

Marketing Data Platforms complement existing tools like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs), facilitating agile measurement and analysis of activations conducted through these systems. Clients are also using advanced cases like Marketing Mix Modelling, Anomaly detection and Uplift Modelling.

Menon agrees that there are multiple use cases for MDPs, ranging from 360-degree customer view; segmentation and targeting; personalization; marketing automation; attribution and analytics; content management; cross-channel integration; compliance and data governance; predictive analytics; and customer retention and loyalty.

Indeed, as Bharatesh Salian, Sr. Vice President – Marketing Science and CX, FCB/SIX India, points out, “In today’s evolving and commoditised world, customer experience becomes a deal maker or breaker for more than 80% of the purchase decisions. Hence it becomes very important to map the behavioural data of prospect consumers to identify the right moment of truth when brands can engage and drive the right stimuli to take the action as part of an orchestrated consumer journey.”

“While CDPs or CRM provide the single golden record of the consumer along with their purchase patterns and preferences, the MDPs provide the insights into the behaviour of the users to click on the purchase now button. The ability of the marketing platforms to create data sets and classifications based on propensity to purchase by building on the lookalike audiences also helps tremendously in optimising spends,” adds Salian.

That being said, Paras Mehta, Business Head, Matterkind India, which operates under the IPG Brand says that while Marketing Data Platforms are emerging as valuable complements to existing tools such as CDPs and CRMs, “Their full potential is yet to be fully harnessed. The key challenge lies in the need for a substantial volume of consented data, which is currently a work in progress, mainly due to the presence of multiple walled gardens and limited access to personally identifiable information (PII) datasets.”

“In my perspective, an ideal use case for these platforms would involve three critical steps: firstly, at the advertiser level, establishing a Universal ID that encompasses all actual and potential consumers; secondly, leveraging this Universal ID to orchestrate and control communication and frequency across all marketing channels; and thirdly, utilizing the insights derived from these platforms to further optimize media and communications strategies,” says Mehta.

Menon concludes, “In today’s data-driven world, Marketing Data Platforms enhance the capabilities of CDPs, CRMs, and other data tools by providing a centralized hub for data management, analytics, and marketing automation. They empower marketers to create more personalized, data-driven, and effective marketing strategies, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and business outcomes.”