Even A B2B Business Needs A Customer Data Platform

Even A B2B Business Needs A B2B Customer Data Platform

Unlike a B2C company, a B2B company has companies and businesses, not individuals as customers. Not only that, a B2B enterprise has to deal with a lengthy and often intricate buying cycle involving multiple departments. Sales is never a straightforward, one-on-one process here.

Hence, if you are a B2B company, you have to be forgiven for not having contemplated adding a customer data platform (CDP) to your MarTech stack, in the mistaken belief that it was only for B2C businesses. You couldn’t be more wrong.

In fact, studies exist that B2B businesses, as buyers of a CDP, will multiply between 2020 and 2025.

A CDP can play a major role in account-based marketing in a B2B business. It will help evolve a single source of truth, and with it, help identify buyers, create buyer segments, deliver targeted content; in short, deliver a successful one-on-one marketing campaign.

Are B2C And B2B Customer Data Platforms Very Different From Each Other?

At a macro level, the answer is “no.” The underlying principle of both CDPs is the same: to provide a unified view of customers based on the data available to make marketing and customer service highly effective.

Where the difference comes in is in the strategy that both forms of CDPs help assist with. For example, in a B2B company, a CDP is at the very heart of its account-based marketing strategy. The platform is used to gain insights from their prospects’ data, say, for example, targeting a strategic prospect with a special offer based on a certain action by the latter. On the other hand, in the B2C world, CDPs are used to gather intelligence and to activate insights related to existing customers.

Using a CDP, a B2B business can compile data from all its marketing and sales stacks, and third-party sources. This eventually helps B2B companies deploy smarter campaigns to grab enterprise accounts. Some B2B companies have reportedly increased as much as 70% higher engagement with fellow companies when using a CDP.

What Capabilities Must A B2B Customer Data Platform Have?

First and foremost, what any B2B CDP worth its price tag must be able to deliver is the wherewithal to map leads to accounts. Because as a B2B business, you’re selling to individuals in buying centers and accounts that live in hierarchies.

Here are some of the must-have features of a B2B CDP:

Integration with Sales and 3^rd party sources: This is of primary importance because Sales must be able to effectively work on the leads passed on it by Marketing. Things must go beyond the simple sharing of data.

Also, the CDP must be able to ingest and integrate data from 3^rd party sources into unified profiles.‍

Flexible: A B2B CDP should be able to connect with outside systems and data from any source. Never go in for CDPs that cannot do so. It is also vital that a B2B vendor is not linked to one specific platform but they need to be functional across your technologies.

Scalable: There are cases where initially a B2B company may have to work low volumes of data, but a good B2B CDP must be scalable, i.e. must be able to enlarge in scope and size once the customer base increases.

Oyster B2B CDP

The Express Analytics Oyster CDP has all of the above qualities and more. It allows marketers to map user & account details to help them run account-based marketing campaigns.

So, for example, Oyster collects user IDs when multiple apps such as HubSpot, LinkedIn, etc. are connected to develop one single master profile. No more confusion about the identity of a contact. What’s more, you can even create the same profile for logged-in and non-logged-in users. All of which help eliminate duplicate contacts.

Oyster b2b CDP also gives Sales & Marketing the data to truly understand their customers to drive personalized engagement. It allows customer segmentation and audience management, be it lists of people or a list of accounts, at a drilled-down level, something not seen in other B2B CDPs.