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6 audience growth challenges you can solve with a customer data platform

Last updated: January 15, 2024

It takes more than buzz to earn someone’s business. You need to understand your audience’s behaviors and preferences, collect data that accurately represents those patterns, make it accessible to your whole team, and ensure you’re getting updates in real time.  

And all that’s before sending your newsletter or writing a new article.  

Because once you’ve got their audience data, you need to harness it to create personalized and effective content across every marketing channel.  

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If you’re struggling to keep up, take a deep breath and top off your green tea. Because we’ve got some good news.  

A customer data platform can help you address all of these needs at once. These tools collect data from every touchpoint you use to reach your audience — from events and email to print and offline — then standardize it and clear it of duplicates. This gives everyone on your team the most complete, current view of each customer- and makes it easier to create campaigns that’ll keep them coming back. 

In this post, we’ll list the biggest challenges marketers face today – and tell you how a customer data platform can help you overcome each one.   

6 ways to grow your audience with a customer data platform

Implement an omni-channel outreach strategy  

It takes about 7 exposures for someone to make a purchase. Sure, you could send someone 7 promotional emails. But limiting yourself to one platform has its downsides: Either you’ll take too long to reach the required seven contacts, or you’ll send them 7 emails in quick succession and get spam complaints. 

Spreading your messaging across multiple channels helps you spread the word without annoying your audience. For instance, you could send someone three drip emails promoting your subscription, then target them with a personalization on your website and a display ad on Facebook. 

But it takes time and technical know-how to transfer customer data between your CRM, email and marketing automation tool, payment platforms – and that keeps many companies from executing cross-channel campaigns quickly enough to drive sales.  

With a CDP, you have all the audience data you need to create a cross-channel campaign – all in one place. Besides saving time, this lowers your subscriber acquisition costs and makes it easier to connect with each one. (All good things to share with your advertisers!) 

Improve the ROI and effectiveness of your content  

The ROI equation has two key pieces: increasing revenue and cutting costs. CDPs help you optimize both sides of that equation: By centralizing all audience data in one place, CDPs save time spent transferring data between systems. Besides reducing time costs, this also helps you spend more time on revenue generating tasks.  

CDPs give you a clearer view of everyone in your audience – and how they’re interacting with you across every channel. In one glance, you can see exactly what articles, meters, emails and campaigns are driving sales for you – then double down on what works.  

Personalize communications, experiences and interactions  

Data is the foundation of personalization. The better your data, the more relevant your content and promotions will be for your audience.   

Customer data platforms ensure that your profiles cover every marketing channel and that they’re free of duplicates, giving you the most accurate view of everyone interacting with your brand. This makes it easier to personalize your content to each individual’s needs. You can use that information to:   

• power your content recommendations 
• create more relevant and profitable up- and cross-sells 
• serve more relevant articles and recommendations to each email recipient via dynamic content  
• create more exact and precise marketing segments, based on both demographic and behavioral characteristics  

Create a single view of your audience members across channels and interactions  

Customer data platforms create a single view of each customer by combining customer data from every marketing channel into one central database. API transfers and nightly file drops ensure that data is flowing into the system and that changes are made in real time.  

Incoming profile data is automatically added to the person’s pre-existing customer profile. So if Alyssa downloads a white paper from you, that interaction is automatically listed on her customer profile.   

The day she reads the white paper, your sales team can pull up her profile, see that she recently downloaded content on manufacturing, then send her an email promoting their manufacturing magazine. In this case, real time profile updates make it easier for your sales team to reach out with a relevant offer- and do it quickly enough to make an impact.   

Audience members are also automatically added and removed from segments based on these real-time profile updates. So if you have a segment for people interested in manufacturing content, Alyssa would be automatically added to that segment, and receive relevant communications, as soon as she downloads the manufacturing white paper.

This ensures that each person’s profile reflects all of their interests – and that they’re added to the right segments more quickly. Having a single customer view ensures that everyone gets the offers and content they need to engage further.   

Drive decision-making and audience insights 

Most CDPs, including Omeda, include built-in website analytics. That way, you can see exactly what posts and content keep your audience engaged. Besides just pageviews, you can see how long every viewer spends on your site, how many other pages they visit, and what makes them bounce.  

With this information, you can track (and then optimize) your recirculation rates. And once you get more repeat visits and recirculation, you can create more lucrative advertising packages (which, in turn, funds even better content!).  

It’s not just about content, either: Your CDP’s website analytics tell you how effective your website design, widgets (like content recommendations) and personalizations (like exit-intent pop-ups) are at encouraging repeat engagement.  

So instead of defaulting to generic best practice, you can tailor your website content and design it completely to your audience’s preferences – and create a website that drives even more revenue.  

Manage data quality  

Data unlocks insights that help you personalize your marketing and drive decision making. But if your data’s dirty and out of date. it won’t actually reflect what’s going on with your audience.  

CDPs like Omeda don’t always clean your data. But their data unification and standardization capabilities prevent different teams from creating the non-standard naming conventions, formats and labels that create dirty data.  

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