Growth without compromise: 3 reasons to invest in CDP and CX technology in a difficult economic market

Economic uncertainty continues to persist, leading to fears, doubts and speculation about where to pivot when it comes to financial decisions. For businesses of all sizes and across sectors, spending has been slashed or frozen, especially when it comes to marketing investments.

For marketing leaders pushing for investment in martech, the value proposition must include:

• Demonstrable, short-term value for the C-suite
• A clear, long-term roadmap that shows how use cases and martech’s capabilities will optimize time-to-value realization. The roadmap needs to show value not just for CMOs and marketing departments, but also for CIOs, CTOs and CFOs.

Developing the value proposition means addressing several critical realities about marketing today:

• The growing need for personalization in marketing campaigns
• The ever-increasing value of first-party data
• The importance of developing and delivering on KPIs

For APAC businesses, there are several unique opportunities, particularly given that identity match rates, especially in ASEAN, are above the global average. That said, a recent survey indicates that nearly 75% of APAC C-suite executives are facing increasing pressure to prove short-term ROI on marketing campaigns.

The opportunities are considerable for brands that make targeted investments in martech. There is significant opportunity to leverage martech investments to overtake competitors in a highly paced marketplace while delivering long-term value.

Short-term ROI to showcase potential long-term value 

What do you need from your martech solution? For marketers, the answer is usually one or more of the following:

• Data collection
• Data integration and unification
• Analytics
• Marketing orchestration

For leaders and digital consultants alike, the key is to identify and target the factors that are most critical or causing the most pain and hindering business success.

When those needs are determined, the next step is to identify a proof of concept (POC) that will deliver short-term ROI using strategic mapping of use cases and customer-centric KPIs that will be achieved. With a compelling POC in place, C-suite leaders can determine value, stakeholders can show the impact of their respective KPIs and day-to-day marketers can leverage the direct benefits of the martech solution.

Lytics partner, TheEngage —a strategic marketing consultancy— works closely with APAC clients. We are frequently in conversations where there is lots of enthusiasm for diving right into adoption of martech. However, the conversation often stalls when the need to design a strategy, map use cases, and define success are raised. It’s a risky proposition to adopt technologies without insightful design and strategy. Often the results are poor realized value, ROI, and time-to-value. And ultimately, the solution is often under-utilized.

The vendor landscape for martech is vast and crowded, with nearly 10,000 vendors as of 2022. Leaning into the design and strategy phase helps to sort through the noise and find the right solution for each business. TheEngage has seen the POC approach leading to real success for clients. That’s because it’s an agile, cost-effective and progressive process designed to build long-term technologies that create measurable and clear competitive advantages.

Here is a closer look at the three challenges marketers face and are looking to technology to help resolve.

Challenge 1: Compromising on marketing personalization is affecting the bottom line

Personalization is critical today, allowing brands to provide specific, relevant and valued messages to customers. It’s also the expectation. A McKinsey study showed that 71% of consumers expect personalization as a basic feature of their experience with brands.

The need for personalization becomes even more critical in a recession, and for brands, that has to start with data. Consumers will be scrutinizing their spending choices more, evaluating when and how much to spend. The likelihood of swapping loyalty for cost-savings is high.

Personalization provides a way for brands to keep those relationships intact. Personalized marketing can lift revenues by 10 to 15%, according to the McKinsey report. More importantly, it helps boost loyalty, retention and repurchases, all of which add long-term value.

The solution to the personalization dilemma

High-speed activation platforms that can create personalized messages for campaigns will deliver much-needed value and, more importantly, relevance to customers. These platforms should include analytics tools that create optimal ROI and the ability to adapt and evolve personalization options in real time.

Take for example TheEngage’s collaboration with a leading global consumer goods brand (with a new D2C eCommerce platform set to launch in a key APAC market), it was vital for the brand to orchestrate highly personalized eCommerce experiences driven by real-time insights, at scale. The fit-for-purpose solution that helped achieve this is Lytics Decision Engine: it enabled the brand to create a single view of the customer, based on their interactions, browsing behavior, affinities and stronger connections with each engagement. With this the brand will be able able to deliver unique and targeted offers to not just convert, but also to drive repeat purchases.

In highly competitive markets like ASEAN, where D2C models have a bright future, targeted omnichannel experiences will be crucial to convert and retain customers who constantly switch between online and offline touch points. On the business-side, for C-suite executives, such technologies can showcase the value realization of effectively utilizing first-party data, improved ROAS, and positive customer experiences.

Challenge 2: Prioritizing existing customers to lift revenues and maximize first-party data

Marketers always want to keep current customers engaged while attracting new customers. However, the financial pressures mean a focus on existing customers makes financial sense, with considerable ROI possible on retention and nurturing. To best understand your customers, you need to rely on first-party data, integrated and unified, to create complete profiles on your customers. With fuller profiles, you can develop the tactics that will engage customers with high customer lifetime value (CLV).

The solution to businesses’ first-party data problem

As customer demands rise and data privacy regulations change, designing a comprehensive first-party data strategy is an imperative. TheEngage has been working tirelessly to craft our own point of view on first-party data and share our vision on how early adopters can get ahead in the game to drive better customer experiences and better performance from their digital marketing investments. Forward-thinking brands need a customer data platform (CDP) to deliver CX excellence and say goodbye to third-party cookie dependency.  Lytics Conductor, for example, creates unified customer profiles using first-party data collected from multiple sources. 

Highly capable CDPs, like Lytics, helps brands identify cohorts, identify high-value customers and build models that result in high-value outcomes. This enables businesses to save time and effort by eliminating the need for manual identity management and personalization. These abilities are fundamental to thriving in a cookieless world. 

An early advocate of CDPs in APAC, TheEngage is thrilled to see the emerging excitement around CDPs potential in the region. But a relatively short runway to the cookie-apocalypse means that developing a first-party data strategy powered by CDPs needs to start sooner than later. 

Challenge 3: Needing to realize benefits beyond marketing KPIs

Marketing and IT are increasingly interrelated and connected. With growing reliance on technology, marketing teams need IT specialists, data analysts, and engineers to create optimized results and deliver on KPIs. These realities can put pressure on budgets and day-to-day operations, creating bottlenecks as marketing requests for IT resources grow.

Businesses that are expanding or going into new markets will need to consider the benefits of:

• Operational efficiency
• Cost-savings
• And consistency. 

A simple example of this is TheEngage’s collaboration with a global B2C brand that is shifting towards centralizing its first-party data activation strategy, including APAC. A common challenge in such efforts is not necessarily a tech issue, but an organizational challenge of breaking silos where various markets or business units may collect, store, structure and manage data very differently. So before planning and activation, brands need a comprehensive understanding of their existing data, and the technology stack that manages this data.

By working closely with the stakeholders across marketing, IT and product-related departments, we were able to comprehensively map the similarities and differences in their technology stack and how first-party data flows within it, across each market. Such data and technology deep-dives provide invaluable insights that marketing, IT and C-suite decision-makers need. Enabling them to plan and execute, at-scale, a first-party data strategy and CDP activation, to reduce inefficiencies and maximize long-term success.

The solution for a better measure of success

Marketing platforms today need to embrace ease-of-use, empowering stakeholders to be more agile. Investing in the right martech can reduce bottlenecks resulting from persistent demands on time-strapped IT and developer resources.

Selecting martech today means finding solutions that don’t just allow for integrated systems.

• The ideal martech tools should also allow day-to-day users, such as marketers to integrate data, manage processes, generate analytics and orchestrate needs across channels.
• Getting it right means having technologies that are future-proofed, designed to address some of the disruptions facing marketers today, including the loss of third-party cookies, increased data privacy and compliance mandates and ever-present cyberthreats.
• You will need to establish impactful metrics of success such as operational efficiency, increased adoption rate and a team of well-equipped growth drivers. 

Why act now?

What is the risk to your business of a compromised or suboptimal martech stack? With continued threats of a recession and inflationary pressures, can your business afford to not invest in marketing? If you do, you run the risk of being left behind by customers when the economy improves. Businesses that play the long game, balancing cost cuts with strategic investments in marketing, are more likely to weather an economic slowdown. And they usually come out on the other side stronger.

Customers expect personalized experiences with your brand. Brands need the ability to integrate, analyze and orchestrate high-quality data in real-time. Finding the right martech stack to empower your business and meet goals means careful preparation, planning and execution. Designing a fit-for-purpose martech stack that enables business goals from a POC stage, through to a mid and long-term route will give brands the agility and control along every step of their recovery and growth journey.

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Contributing authors: Neel Banerjee and Nithun Nanda