Keep control of your data: Thursday’s Daily Brief
There are allegations that Amazon exploited the data of other companies selling on its platform.
MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, and why is it so important for brands to build up and closely guard their first-party data?
There are many reasons, not just one. But one of the most important reasons is so that marketers can unlock the value in their data. And they shouldn’t hand over that value to other companies if they can help it.
That sounds like common sense. But the new report on Amazon’s purported practices using transactional and product data to create knock-off brands that undercut those brands that sell on Amazon is a stellar example of the value brands gain in their customer relationships, and why that valuable data should be held close to the vest.
With the proliferation of new digital channels and technology, there are more ways than ever to connect directly with your customers. Advertising and selling within a walled garden is expensive enough without factoring in all the value you lose by giving up control over the data when your customers interact on a giant third-party site.
Chris Wood,
Editor
DAM is more than a tech tool
In the first of a series of articles on getting digital asset management, DAM consultant Mark Davey emphasizes that preparedness is the key to DAM success. Fact one: “Digital Asset Management is a metadata engine that can drive your content through a myriad of channels on a ton of devices with the automation and analytics your business needs to compete today and in future digital ecosystems.”
Mistake one: “Everyone goes looking for a vendor first.” Technology is only a small part of getting DAM right. A lack of preparedness, meaning siloed stakeholders, reluctance to change, and no overall digital transformation strategy, can’t be compensated for by the choice of a DAM solution. “DAM is a little different from buying a traditional piece of software to run your workflows and processes,” he writes. “DAM is not only a software tool; it is a strategy that needs project management, change management and a vision, with the right resources necessary to drive it.”
This series will examine each aspect of DAM from a strategic standpoint, what the client needs to do in terms of preparedness, and getting management buy-in with the right metrics, including the project management implications of an end-to-end content lifecycle process.
Choosing and implementing a CDP
Given the changing marketing landscape, having a holistic understanding of customers is essential. This is why more businesses are turning to customer data platforms (CDPs) to help improve their efforts.
“Last year, 2020, just accelerated the digital growth across the world,” said Ekta Chopra, CDO at e.l.f. Beauty, in her recent MarTech presentation. “You’re swimming in data, but 75% of that data is not actionable. 13% is aggregated and everything else is probably not. And 44% of the data is not real-time.”
Storing and collecting vast amounts of customer data isn’t enough. Your organization’s CDP needs to provide actionable insights as well.
CDPs and CRMs, some ground rules
Responding to Editorial Director Kim Davis’s editorial in yesterday’s Daily Brief, “I say CDP, you say CRM,” David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, took Kim to task for perpetuating some confusion. With his permission, we published his comments.
You do your readers a huge disservice by conflating CDP and CRM. Yes, both store customer data – as do data lakes, data warehouses, marketing automation, email engines, personalization tools, web content managers, and a host of other systems. Each of those is designed for a specific purpose and stores customer data in a way that fits that purpose.
CRM also has its own purpose – to support sales and service agents when speaking with customers – and is optimized for it. CRMs are notoriously bad at dealing with data that was imported from elsewhere, and with unstructured and semi-structured data types. They’re generally poor at sharing their data with other systems.
CDP has a different purpose – to combine all customer data into shareable profiles.
Quote of the day
“As consumers demand more transparency, and new laws and regulations come into effect, brands must reconsider their data practices and think beyond legal compliance to stay in the game.” Priscilla Debar, Associate General Counsel, Acoustic (in her recent MarTech conference talk, free registration required)
Digital asset management platforms: A snapshot
What is it? Anyone who’s struggled to find a file on their computer or shared drive understands the pain of tracking down content. And when you consider the sheer amount of files you need to sort through when many versions are created to resonate with specific audiences, these tasks can feel overwhelming. Digital asset management platforms simplify these tasks by bringing all of your marketing content together.
Why are they important? Marketers are creating engaging content for more channels than ever before, which means the software used to manage these assets is gaining importance. What’s more, the communications between businesses and their customers are increasingly digital. Marketing content today is created in a wide variety of formats and distributed wherever consumers are digitally connected.
Why now? More than half of 1,000 consumers recently surveyed said they’re more likely to make a purchase if brand content is personalized, according to the Adobe Consumer Content Survey. Digital asset management platforms help marketers implement these personalization tactics. They also provide valuable insights into content interaction and the effectiveness of their assets.
Why we care. When those creating and using content aren’t near one another, having a central repository for assets is helpful. Finding the right content for your audience is made simpler when each version is organized in the same location. For these reasons and more, your marketing operations could benefit from adopting a digital asset management system.
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