AI has been a part of the Martech landscape for some time. However, with the rising popularity and public discussion surrounding AI technologies like ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, Google’s Bard AI, and others, marketers and industry leaders are increasingly focused on understanding whether their Martech stack is genuinely AI-enabled and what that means in terms of delivery.
A recent survey by McKinsey sheds light on the current usage of AI-enabled technology for growth efforts and how it’s expected to change in the next two years. According to the McKinsey report on AI-powered marketing and sales, “Our research found that 90 percent of commercial leaders expect to utilize generative AI solutions ‘often’ over the next two years.”
After COVID-19, the current era is the second most critical period for marketers across industries to transform their Martech stacks to accommodate AI-enabled technology capable of driving growth through consent-driven, first-party data.
CDP and Its Role in AI-Driven Martech Stacks
Many businesses have heavily invested in Martech with promises of AI capabilities, predictive recommendations, and user-friendly interfaces. However, they often struggle to achieve the desired sales conversions. The problem doesn’t lie with the technologies themselves but rather with their ability to be led by a unified system of intelligence, one that can help achieve overall business objectives instead of individual tasks. That system of central intelligence is the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
An example from our executive interviews involved a company that used one product for event registrations and another for automating email distribution and customer databases. Despite both products dealing with registration information, they couldn’t communicate and ended up duplicating functions. The lack of coordination resulted in wasted resources and time. – Don’t Buy the Wrong Marketing Tech, HBR
What Is a CDP?
A CDP is a software solution that centralizes data from all customer touchpoints, consolidating and activating this data to enable enterprises to deliver superior customer experiences (CX) and achieve a higher ROI on marketing efforts. CDPs are designed to seamlessly integrate with your technology stack through APIs, acting as a smart hub that enhances agility, flexibility, and scalability. They capture every customer interaction, online or offline, and create a comprehensive interaction history, enabling marketers to build a 360-degree view of customers and prospects.
CDP as the Central System of Marketing Intelligence
The cornerstone of real-time data-driven marketing is a brand’s ability to ingest data from all known channels, process it in real time, and provide insights and predictions almost instantly. While each component of your Martech stack may or may not deliver this capability in its siloed ecosystem, your company’s growth is impeded if these systems do not function as a unified unit to achieve your business objectives. A CDP, with its ability to capture offline and online customer interaction history, including unstructured data, can create a complete customer profile that marketing managers can leverage to track the customer journey. A CDP enables brands to map the complete customer lifecycle across channels and bring this multichannel data intelligence and real-time customer engagement to the industry.
Key Features of AI-Powered Customer Data Platforms
- Support for structured and unstructured data from live data sources and offline data loading.
- Capability to listen to customer interactions through all digital channels, regardless of data type and interaction.
- Segmentation of online data using system-defined tags and offline data through user-defined tags for optimized and targeted campaign designing and launch on a multichannel SaaS-based platform.
- Real-time optimization, including the processing, analytics, and optimized preferences of customer engagement data in real-time.
- Real-time customer engagement using Big Data and data sciences integration.
- Insights, including basic segmentation, data visualization processes, complementing marketing strategy, and execution.
- A marketing automation/cross-channel campaign management platform that enables marketers to build audiences and publish once across many channels, simultaneously based on transactional, behavioral, and lifecycle conditions.
According to a Tealium report from January 2022, 97% of executives said artificial intelligence capabilities are important to achieving their marketing priorities. – (Tealium 2022 State of the CDP, January 2022)
FirstHive: Empowering Marketers with AI-Enabled Central Intelligence
FirstHive brings multichannel data intelligence and real-time customer engagement to the industry. This Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment enables value proposition using cloud computing.
- Online and offline data integration: FirstHive’s marketing automation platform captures your offline and online customer interaction history, including unstructured data. Unlike many marketing automation systems, FirstHive can create a complete customer profile that marketing managers can leverage to track the customer journey.
- Relevant, targeted campaigns: FirstHive’s marketing platform enables deeper segmentation while publishing to multiple channels. Customer intelligence by FirstHive integrates into your closed-loop sales and marketing system, allowing B2B and B2C marketers to sift through vast amounts of complex customer data to identify relevant information and create real-time buying opportunities at various phases of the customer journey.
- Real-time social dashboards: Social media management by FirstHive is the key to monetizing real-time cross-channel marketing. FirstHive’s real-time cross-channel marketing takes conversations and customer interactions, using a marketing platform with listening capabilities, and incorporates them into customer profiles that can then be contextualized in campaigns to deliver the right offer in real-time.
By incorporating a CDP like FirstHive into your Martech stack, you can harness the power of AI-driven marketing, deliver personalized experiences, and drive growth like never before. In this era of digital transformation, having the right tools and technologies at your disposal can make all the difference in achieving your marketing goals and fostering brand loyalty.
