A customer data platform, or CDP, brings insights from various platforms into one place, allowing marketers and people from similar fields to make intelligent decisions based on aggregated data.
BlueConic is one of a number of CDPs on the rise. There are several things that have contributed to its success, as the company’s Senior VP of Strategy, Cory Munchbach, notes:
“There are a few things that differentiate us in what is an increasingly packed and fractured market,” said Munchbach. “BlueConic is a built-for-purpose customer data platform, rather than technology that has been retrofitted or re-purposed from another category, which reduces the complexity of use and need for further modifications once deployed.”
“We don’t place limits on the amount of customer data marketers can collect and store,” she continues, “either at the profile or attribute level, which means marketers have all the flexibility and scalability they need to unify and activate this data.”
“[T]he last, but perhaps most important, area of differentiation,” says Munchbach, “is in how we approach our client partnerships, with customized roadmaps based on that company’s resources, budgets, and technologies; we borrow from Arthur Ashe and say it’s a ‘start where you are, use what you have, do what you can’ philosophy.’”
It’s Attracting Big-Name Clients by Tackling Known Challenges
Founded in 2010, BlueConic has accumulated over 45 new customers this year alone. Brands ranging from Virgin Mobile to Kiplinger depend on the service to gain knowledge about customers. The continual ability to attract well-known names has helped BlueConic enjoy having an edge on the competition.
One of the ways it’s been able to do that is by addressing known issues marketers face when trying to learn about target markets.
There are many companies within the CDP realm, but they often struggle to provide user-friendly approaches to data management and personalized content for marketers to peruse. BlueConic does both those things and promotes itself as “the world’s simplest and most accessible customer data platform.”
A company cannot attribute that phrase to itself without investing a substantial amount of time and money toward meeting the goals in the tagline. It seems BlueConic has done that, as evidenced by recording growth across multiple years.
It Offers Tools Other Competitors Don’t
A CDP relies on numerous algorithms to deliver information about customers. Included factors range from clickthrough rates to trends among large segments of users. However, BlueConic claims to stand out from similar CDPs by offering data about individual interests powered by a machine learning engine. IT professionals simply install a BlueConic tag within a website’s back end, allowing marketers to focus on individual profile data for users, along with site-wide metrics, such as number of conversions and total views.
Data brokering is a $200 billion industry that involves professionals who collect data from various sources and sell it to marketers. BlueConic takes a more all-encompassing approach to gathering data. It allows marketing teams to import existing data from outside sources and has various built-in ways to collect data. New BlueConic customers even get expert training about how to use the platform’s data collection capabilities during the onboarding process.
BlueConic Can Engage in “Deep Listening”
Marketers often value certain types of data more than others because of what it tells them. Hard data figures might look at how often a person visits a website and which months have the highest visitor levels.
However, BlueConic goes even further and compiles data that’s not so obvious. It practices what’s known as “deep listening” and finds out:
- What infomation users filled into forms
- Which stages of a multi-step process are most likely to disengage users
- Whether visitors have ad blockers installed
This kind of data collection occurs for unknown as well as known users. BlueConic is built on the idea that listening to users drives better outcomes.
BlueConic’s Free Trial Gives Full Access
Although many CDPs incentivize customers with free trials, they don’t always offer complete access for people who evaluate the products before subscribing to them. BlueConic is different because a free trial provides information for up to 1,000 individuals — known as identifiable profiles — and unlocks all the platform’s features.
The full-featured trial version saves marketers from wondering whether a feature would be useful after merely reading about it. They can try the functionality for themselves, putting it to the test in real-world situations, to gauge BlueConic’s worthiness.
We’re going to hear a lot more about the CDP space.
