Over the past decade or two, CMOs have acquired numerous pieces of technology to support various marketing functions: display advertising, loyalty program, website, customer journey insights, ROI analytics, customer support and so on. What’s often lacking, though, is a strong, continuous connection between all of these pieces.
There’s a particularly big gap between the marketing technology that supports a brand’s owned media platforms — that is, the brand’s own websites, apps, loyalty programs, etc. — and the advertising technology that supports the paid media market.
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1. Recognizing customers across touchpoints. An advertising manager, for example, may have a strategic vision for a series of relationship-building ads. The ads would be triggered on a 1:1 basis when a customer makes a certain type of purchase or reaches a new milestone in the brand’s loyalty program. This strategy requires the ability to recognize a specific customer across all of those touchpoints. And that’s impossible if there’s no continuous connection between the POS/ecommerce system, the loyalty database and the ad targeting platform.
2. Moving as fast as their customers. Consumers move rapidly across digital properties, dropping signals about their long-term interests and near-term purchase intentions as they go. But, because of their siloed technology, marketers are often trailing too far behind their customers to hear those signals, much less respond to them with helpful information and offers in a timely manner.
3. Keeping control of their customer data. Many brands have leaned on digital publishers to make the connection between the brand’s customers and the publisher’s advertising audiences. The problem is, customer-level data goes to the publisher, but doesn’t come back to the brand. The brand loses sight of a key piece of the customer journey — and the ability to carry on a continuous cross-channel conversation with that customer.
What’s the binding, the connective tissue, that can bring all of those technology and data pieces together?
What connective layer can enable marketers to carry on a continuous conversation with their customers across time, channels and touchpoints?
That’s where Signal’s customer identity solution comes in.
Originally published April 13, 2017