Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is the platform to use? 
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features? 
• Is the reporting actionable? 

Other questions to ask: 

How do you calculate search volumes? Knowing how the system treats information types will impact how you ascribe value to certain keyword terms, make decisions about keyword and content choices and affect the ROI of your search marketing efforts. Find out from where raw data is extracted (i.e., analytics, log files, a proprietary tracking pixel). •

Can this system track millions of searches, visits, site pages, etc.? Knowing whether the platform is a true enterprise solution or a simple tool that may not scale for your business needs is crucial. Limits on the numbers of keyword rankings, pages or traffic tracked could impact your use of the system or significantly increase the cost.

Do you support international search? There are many nuances within international SEO that can mislead even the best SEOs. Find out if the numerator in the calculation of the platform’s average clicks per search or average search volume is normalized for global or local (in that market) search and whether search ranks are calculated from within the country or remotely. Does their tool make hreflang coding recommendations? Will it manage the page relationship and directional recommendations? The misapplication of international data could impact the ROI of your search marketing efforts. 

How do you track and report on SERP features? You will want to know if and where your site was listed on the results page. For example, did your listing appear in web results, in Top Stories, in a carousel or the video results? That location and reporting feedback helps to quantify strategic and tactical efforts, which is especially important given that these SERP features can drive substantial or more-targeted traffic. 

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Does your tool help customers understand what competitors do and derive actionable insights from that? What are the most important features the tool has for providing competitive research? Competitive intelligence is a standard feature for virtually all enterprise SEO platforms – but the scope and cost differ between vendors. Find out what level of data is provided about your competitors and vertical industry and make sure it fits your requirements. 

How robust and flexible are your reporting options? Different users have different reporting needs. Find out if reports can be customized and automatically delivered to different users and types of users, and whether data can be exported in CSV format. 

Where are the actionable reports? Enterprise tools have dashboards and generous amounts of data but it’s important to understand how (and which) reports can immediately benefit your business. A good sales team will understand your company’s objectives and KPIs and will have reports ready or be able to run them in real-time. This is data that can be handed over to the appropriate teams and promptly acted upon. 

What other meta-information does your system collect that may be made available via API? Being able to trace search traffic data from the front of the funnel all the way to sales data in a CRM or business intelligence (BI) system will help you to more accurately calculate ROI. 

Is there a workflow built in that allows us to coordinate the work of our marketing, content, web development and social media teams across the organization? SEO cannot operate in a silo. A true enterprise platform should provide built-in workflow management that includes task assignment, management and monitoring of completion rates across groups. 

What does the onboarding process entail and how long will it take? What are the training options (i.e., is it online only or will you send people to our location to train us on-site)? Be sure to find out what onboarding and support is included in pricing and what is an add-on. 

What kind of ongoing support and client engagement will your account team provide? How will you gauge our use or non-use of the platform’s features? One of the most common reasons a company transitions out of an enterprise platform is because they don’t use it enough. How do they propose you avoid tool fatigue and checkout for your organization? A vendor should be prepared to address this issue and specifically how the tool creatively engages users and gets them back into the environment. 

What new features are you considering? What are the long-term roadmap and launch dates? The SEO landscape is constantly changing with new features to further leverage digital assets rapidly coming out of Google and Bing. This is especially important as AI chat interfaces emerge as a key channel for customer engagement. Find out how quickly the vendor responds to the implementation of new SERP features and begins tracking them. It’s important to understand the level of innovation and the ability to add and track emerging technologies. Knowing a vendor’s new feature release date schedule and its ability to stick to committed timelines is also important. This helps establish long-term trust and an expectation with the vendor that it will always be on the cutting edge of SEO.

The post 12 questions to ask SEO platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Do you need an enterprise SEO platform?

Deciding whether your company needs an enterprise-level SEO platform calls for the same
evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment
of your organization’s business needs and resources, staffing, management support and financial resources.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Use the following questions as guidelines to determine the answers.

The post Does your marketing team need an SEO platform? appeared first on MarTech.

SEO is not just about content creation and promotion anymore. It also involves improving the user experience and adapting to the evolving ways that search engines display and deliver results across different platforms like voice assistants. However, traditional SEO practices are still relevant. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition and rank tracking, are still essential for success even in a changing landscape.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that include all of those, as well as competitive intelligence, social signal integration and workflow rights and roles.

Enterprise-level platforms may also provide more extensive link and site audits or analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority. Vendors differentiate by offering more frequent or detailed data updates or content marketing features that sometimes require additional investment.

The following section, from our SEO platform guide for marketing (downloadable here), discusses some of these capabilities and the key considerations involved in choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link analysis and acquisition

Links are still one of the key external or “off-the-page” factors that can help a website rank higher in search engines. Most platforms for enterprise SEO offer link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal suggestions based on competitive analysis, and other reports that show opportunities for getting links (i.e., what sites should you ask for links from) as part of their core platforms.

Keyword research/rank analysis

Keyword research —  finding out what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for different queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy — is a fundamental part of effective SEO. Almost all platforms for enterprise SEO offer keyword research tools that help marketers understand how consumers search for content, and what keywords are bringing traffic for competitors.

However, vendors get this data in different ways. Some license data from point solutions or ISPs, because Google’s terms of use limit the use of scraped data and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided).” Others create and maintain their own database of keyword terms. As a result, reliable keyword data has become more scarce and costly.

It’s also worth noting that rank analysis has become more complicated as Google has increased its use of more dynamic and visual search engine results pages (SERP). Marketers are not happy with just a simple numeric indication of how their page ranks for a specific query; they want to know if it’s shown in a Carousel, in a Knowledge panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways crawled content is being displayed on the SERPs. One of the latest additions to this category, Visably, offers a very different perspective on ranking, going as far as to look at all of the content on pages that rank for a certain keyword and then categorizing those pages.

All of this data aims to give brands a sense of how they’re perceived in search overall, even if the brand-related activity is happening on third-party sites.

Search intent-based analysis

Google’s search algorithms, often powered by artificial intelligence, now focus less on keyword matches and more on search intent. To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more tools to analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that would meet the searcher’s needs.

Custom site crawls/audits

Content quality is a key factor for SEO success, so marketers need to use site crawls or audits to evaluate their websites. Enterprise SEO platforms can help by providing suggestions for improving keywords, page layouts, and site accessibility. They can also rank and score different elements of the web pages, such as HTML tags and meta-tags.

The frequency of site crawls varies among SEO platforms. Some do it daily, while others do it weekly. The best tools should be able to scan the whole site, not just a sample of pages, and should also support mobile-friendly and AMP pages. However, some sites are too big to be fully crawled by any tool.

Social signal tracking and integration

Social media activity isn’t directly included in search engine ranking algorithms, but pages that are highly shared benefit from higher traffic, and watching social activity can help inform content creation and distribution strategies. 

Most enterprise SEO platforms track, measure, and integrate social signals into their analytics and dashboard reports. These capabilities range from social signal tracking and correlations to site traffic and conversions, as well as social profile monitoring and sentiment analysis, and contact-relationship management.

While most vendors do well at tracking organic traffic, few currently track paid social activity.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Content marketing and analysis

Google has made content quality more important for SEO with its updates and features like BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird). So, marketers need to create relevant and fresh content to rank well.

Enterprise SEO platforms have improved their content optimization and marketing tools to help marketers with this. They offer features like page management, content performance reports, influencer campaigns, and real-time content suggestions.

Some platforms also analyze the content and compare it with competitors to find gaps and suggest improvements. They can help marketers create better and deeper content on relevant topics.

A new trend among vendors is to automatically recommend topics for content creation, saving marketers time and effort. Some even help with developing the content that matches the target keywords.

International search tracking

As more U.S.-based businesses operate online and offline in different countries and languages, they need to have international search coverage. This means they can optimize their websites for different regions, languages, and alphabets. Most enterprise SEO platforms can do this by providing features like international keyword research, global market and search volume data, and global CPC currency data.

Mobile/local analytics

Google wants to make mobile and local searches better for users. So, it favors sites that work well on mobile devices. Marketers need more and better data and analytics to help them make their sites mobile-friendly and rank higher. Many vendors have features that let marketers check their sites for mobile issues, rankings, and metrics by device (like desktop, tablet, or phone) and by location.

Technical SEO crawling

Mobile traffic is very important, so marketers need tools to find and fix problems that may make their pages load slowly or look bad on mobile devices. This includes showing how their pages rank for Core Web Vitals. Also, schema markup is needed if a page wants to show up in one of the special displays like featured snippets. Many tools can spot schema mistakes and help fix them.

Cross-device attribution

Marketers know SEO is not the only way to promote their brands and that paid media can also affect search traffic (especially on brand keywords). Some vendors are creating features to help marketers figure out what marketing activity is bringing visitors or sales to their sites. But the declining used of third-party cookies is making this more difficult.

The benefits of using SEO platforms

With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images, and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming.

Using an SEO platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, managing SEO through an enterprise toolset can provide the following benefits:

• Many tools, one interface. SEO platforms perform many tasks in one system. A comprehensive dashboard can help your organization monitor SERP rankings and trends, how you measure up to competitors and your share of voice. The integration and prioritization of tasks, reporting, and user permissions can offer substantial benefits to enterprise-level SEO operations.
• Intent insights. Because of the search engines’ increased focus on user intent, enterprise-level SEO tool vendors are developing machine learning models that analyze user behavior and site content to help marketers answer searchers’ questions.
• More efficient management of global operations. Enterprise SEO tools have built-in diagnostics that can be invaluable on a global scale to identify site-wide issues across languages, countries or regions. These tools uncover macro and micro issues with pages, templates and infrastructure.
• Keeping pace with the search engines. SEO software vendors have dedicated teams and engineers to follow frequent search engine algorithm changes and their impact on the SEO reporting required by enterprises.
• Automated reporting to provide data in near real-time. Many brands end up trying to put a lot of data in spreadsheets and manually update them. But that doesn’t provide a complete view of the data. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer highly customized reporting capabilities that are widget- and wizard-driven to make reporting faster and easier. Many also allow for the export of data to business intelligence tools or other analytics software.

The post What do SEO platforms do and how do they help marketers get found on search engines? appeared first on MarTech.

Use the following questions as a guideline to determine whether an enterprise email marketing platform is right for you.

1. Do we have the right human resources in place? To succeed with email marketing, you need people who can handle all the features that a platform offers. This covers everything from design and content to data and strategy. Depending on the platform, you may need different levels of skill to create email templates.
2. Does our customer data reside in disconnected silos throughout the organization? When different departments like sales, marketing, procurement or customer support don’t work together, your customer may not get the best or most relevant experience with your brand. A platform for email marketing at the enterprise level can help you link these separate systems and understand your customers better.
3. Do we have customer knowledge gaps that could be filled with trusted second- and third-party data? Your brand’s relationship with customers is based on first-party data, such as email addresses, which are becoming more valuable as Google and Apple phase out third-party data sources like cookies and mobile IDs. You can enrich your customer database with other data about who they are, where they live, what they buy and more. This can help you fill in the blanks in your customer knowledge. As you get better at collecting and matching data, and access more shared data sources, you may be able to create a complete picture of your customers.
4. Are we in compliance with CCPA, GDPR and other data privacy regulations? Data privacy is a big issue these days, as more and more cases of data breaches and misuse come to light. This means more rules and regulations to follow, like the GDPR in the EU or the CCPA in the US. Using data to market your brand can give you an edge, but it can also put your brand and your legal status at risk. Many platforms for email marketing can help you comply with the changing laws and build more trust with your customers.
5. Do we have C-level buy-in? Email may seem simple, but it can be tricky to manage at a large scale. A platform for email marketing can help businesses overcome these challenges. To convince top executives of the value of a new platform, you need to show them the results of test projects and agree on what success looks like beforehand.
6. Can we invest in staff training? To get the most out of a new platform, you need to train your technical, design, content and marketing teams regularly. Some platform providers include or charge extra for training, so check with them about this.
7. To what extent do we need to share data and reports with non-email marketing staff? Some platform providers help you connect data across your business, so other teams like customer service and product development can also see the whole customer picture. If you want to use these features, make sure the connections, interfaces and reports work for other people in your organization too.
8. Have we established KPIs and put a system in place for tracking, measuring, and reporting results? You need to have a clear idea of what you want your email marketing to do. Do you want to turn newsletter readers into buyers, or more loyal buyers? Maybe you want to make them like your brand more and guide them through a longer buying process. Having specific goals will help you figure out if you need an enterprise platform and which one suits your business best.
9. Do we have realistic expectations? Switching to a new email platform can take a while to pay off, especially if it’s very different from what you’ve been using. You may need to change your culture and your workflow. Having realistic expectations and goals will help you get support from everyone in your business.

Dig deeper: What is email marketing and how are platforms helping brands succeed?

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post How to decide if you need an enterprise email marketing platform appeared first on MarTech.

Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. A range of platforms is available to marketers depending on their firm’s size, budget and level of digital marketing sophistication.

The more basic functions of marketing automation have become somewhat commoditized, so platform vendors mostly look to differentiate their platforms based on the ability to scale, as well as usability, ease of implementation and customer experience.

MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software in your business.

This 44-page report includes profiles of 10 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. If you are valuating marketing automation software platforms, you need to read this report. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy.

The post Compare 10 top marketing automation platforms appeared first on MarTech.

Email continues to grow because it delivers consistent and impressive results. For every dollar marketers spend on email marketing, they generate $36 in revenue, a Litmus survey of 2,000 email marketers found in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

Depending on what industry you’re in, your company’s ROI could be even higher. Agencies in marketing, PR and advertising see a return of $42 for every $1 they spend on email, and businesses in retail, ecommerce and consumer goods are rewarded with $45 in revenue for each dollar spent.

The centrality of data and the need for updated technology

Email may have been around since the dawn of the internet, but the space doesn’t stand still. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.

When MarTech surveyed marketers for the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey, they said technologies for email distribution and for marketing automation (a chief component of which is email), were both in the top four software types replaced over the previous 18 months.

Dig deeper MarTech’s email marketing experts to follow

Marketing automation was the most replaced application, with 23% of respondents in 2022 saying they’d replaced it, versus 24% in 2021. Email distribution technologies were replaced by 21% of those surveyed in 2022, compared to 24% in 2021.

Most of the respondents who replaced email distribution systems were moving to a commercial application, either from another commercial vendor or a homegrown solution. The primary reason: to take advantage of new and better features.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The latest generation of email technology

When it comes to technology, maturity can be a disadvantage. New businesses can more easily leverage the latest capabilities of software development, while established firms may be saddled with legacy technologies and architectures.

Of course, technology players often introduce new features – some at a higher rate than others. But doing that on top of an aging infrastructure, while also keeping things running for an existing customer base, can be challenging.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven communications between business and customers to digital channels like email, that preference seems to hold up even now that the pandemic is waning. Fifty-seven percent of customers said they preferred to engage with businesses via email in 2022, down from 65% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

Despite this preference, lots of emails land in inboxes without getting an open, much less a read or a click. Meanwhile, recipients spent an average of only 10 seconds reading brand emails in the first three quarters of 2021, a Litmus analysis of eight billion email opens found. That was down from 11.8 seconds in 2020 and 13.4 seconds in 2018.

These statistics explain why marketers, and the email marketing platform vendors serving them, are focusing on technologies to create more personalized, relevant and engaging messages that improve the odds of their content being read and acted on.

The personalization imperative amid data pressures

Meanwhile, other developments are changing the data landscape, making it harder to even gather statistics like these about users’ interactions with emails. Because of efforts to safeguard customer privacy, tech companies are making it harder for marketers to collect data about individual users.

In addition to the pending demise of third-party cookies, both Apple and Google are reducing the utility of mobile ad identifiers in an effort to safeguard customer privacy. Another change affecting email marketing, in particular, arose in mid-2021 when Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features in iOS, Mac OS and Watch OS that can limit the data available to marketers by concealing opens and IP addresses.

Another Apple feature, Hide My Email, lets users create their own unique random email addresses that forward to their inboxes. This means that a person could use a unique email address for every business with whom they have a relationship, foiling technologies that seek to tie together behavior from different sources to get a holistic view of a customer’s interests and needs.

These changes are spurring a dramatic shift to first-party data in all digital marketing disciplines, and they have led to the decline of the open rate as a meaningful email marketing metric, since MPP obscures whether, or when, emails are opened by using a cache.

Both the increased emphasis on data-driven personalization and the shifts in the data landscape have spurred vendors of email marketing platforms to augment the data available within their platforms and change the emphasis to metrics other than open rate.

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

Click here to check it out!

Enterprise email marketing platform capabilities

Email marketing platforms usually offer features for email creation and sending, but consolidation and integrations have added to what one might have once expected. Common capabilities of these platforms include:

• Message design and creation
• Workflow automation and collaboration
• Message previewing
• Email sending
• Deliverability management
• Data management
• Ecommerce capabilities
• Analytics and reporting
• Third-party integrations
• Automation and landing pages

Some providers may offer more advanced capabilities, such as:

• More full-featured customer data platform functionality
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities leveraged through different parts of the platform

The benefits of email marketing platforms

While any but the most nascent of businesses will likely have adopted some approach to email, given its centrality to business in general, adopting an enterprise solution offers many benefits. These may include:

• Data unification across channels. Some email marketing platforms include full-fledged customer data platforms, but, even if they don’t, the customer databases associated with these systems can serve as a single source of truth across an organization. Such unification can provide businesses with a complete portrait of their customers, permitting them to leverage data for marketing, customer service and product development purposes. Platforms can also assist with compliance with CAN-SPAM and other privacy regulations.
• A more unified technology stack overall. Most email marketing platforms offer extensive integrations with other business technologies, allowing companies to more easily work across silos.
• Ability to identify more profitable audiences and segmentation strategies. The unified data trove gives marketers the opportunity to get to know their customers better, and also to identify lookalike audiences by connecting to additional data sources. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can surface useful insights that marketers may not know to look for.
• More efficient workflows. Every email message that’s meant to be delivered to an audience or segment typically goes through an internal review and approval process. Some email marketing platforms feature the ability to collaborate and obtain approvals within the platform, which is especially helpful for larger more-distributed organizations and those in more regulated industries. Franchises and other multilocation businesses benefit from even more complex systems aimed at sharing useful assets and establishing guidelines, while also allowing those closest to the customers to add valuable customization.
• More personal and efficient communication with customers. Template design combined with data insights and segmentation can allow businesses to deliver more personalized, relevant and timely messaging. Automation and triggered-messaging features allow for more efficiency, as well. When systems include SMS or mobile notification options, this allows businesses to extend communications to those channels.
• Improved deliverability and design of email messages. Email marketing platforms’ deliverability systems – both technological and relationship-oriented – can help businesses ensure their messages make it to the inbox. Once they arrive, design and preview features give marketers more control over how their messages appear, no matter where they are viewed.
• Access to more advanced templating and interactivity. Interactive capabilities via AMP for email or CSS are more easily accessible with the help of email marketing platforms, allowing businesses to create more engaging messages with better return.
• Better ability to measure return on investment (ROI) and more. Data and reporting capabilities can tie email messages to specific business goals, allowing marketers to optimize content and targeting to achieve the best possible results.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post A guide to how email marketing platforms help brands succeed appeared first on MarTech.

B2B marketers have employed account-based marketing (ABM) for well over a decade, but the approach has quickly begun gaining currency over the past few years and that growth is expected to continue. Forrester predicts that, by 2025, account-based marketing will become the main way most B2B companies identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale activity.

What goes into a successful ABM strategy? Best practices that have emerged focus on these five core areas:

• Data enrichment
• Account targeting.
• Personalization and/or predictive recommendations.
• Interaction management.
• Performance measurement.

MarTech’s Account-Based Marketing Tools: A Marketer’s Guide discusses each of these ABM strategy elements in more detail and shows how ABM platforms help marketers achieve these strategic objectives.

Also included in this free 56-page report are profiles of ABM tools vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to get your copy now.

The post 5 key elements of successful ABM strategies appeared first on MarTech.

Researching identity resolution vendors

Once you determine an enterprise identity resolution platform makes sense for your business, spend time researching individual vendors and their capabilities by doing the following: 

• Create and prioritize a list of identity resolution use cases, from essential to not necessary. 
• Use that list as a basis for your research — many of the vendors profiled in this report also provide blogs, ebooks and interactive tools that can help. 
• Make a list of the vendors meeting your criteria, reach out to them and set a deadline for replies. 
• Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

RFI/RFP process

The RFI/RFP process is an individual preference, however be sure to give the same criteria to each vendor to facilitate comparison. The most effective RFPs only request relevant information and provide ample information about your brand and its identity resolution needs. It should reflect high-level strategic goals and KPIs. For example, mention your company’s most important KPIs and how you will evaluate the success of your efforts. Include details about timelines and the platforms in your existing martech stack. 

When written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure everyone involved comes to a shared understanding of the purpose, requirements, scope and structure of the intended purchase. From the RFP responses, you should be able to narrow your list down to three or four platforms to demo.

Demo the platforms

Schedule demos as close together as possible for the best comparisons. Make sure all potential users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is it to use? 
• Does the vendor understand our business and marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Questions for vendors

Here are some questions to ask vendors that touch on important considerations in your identity resolution search:

Data onboarding and privacy 

• Does the platform support first-party data onboarding? 
• Can we incorporate any of our private customer IDs into the platform? 
• Do you use probabilistic, deterministic or a hybrid approach to matching? 
• How do you validate the accuracy of your deterministic matches? 
• What match rate can we expect, given our vertical market and database size? 
• How do you comply with privacy regulations and consumer choice? 

Identity graph 

• Do you own or license your referential identity data? 
• What are your identity data sources? 
• How do you validate the quality of your identity graph? 
• How much of your data is addressable? 
• How is your identity graph linked to offline PII? 
• Do your identity capabilities apply to non-U.S. markets? 

Martech and adtech integration 

• How does the platform integrate with martech platforms (i.e., CRMs, DSPs, CDPs)? 
• Does the platform feature any built-in data activation capabilities (i.e., personalized email or ad campaign execution)? 
• Do you have APIs available for data import/export? 
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our identity efforts? 

Customer support 

The post 24 questions to ask identity resolution vendors during a demo appeared first on MarTech.

Does our customer data reside in disconnected silos throughout the organization?

Organizational silos between departments such as sales, marketing, procurement or customer support can lead to inconsistent customer experiences with a brand. An identity resolution platform can connect these systems. It will integrate consumer identifiers across channels and devices in a way that is accurate, scalable and privacy compliant to create a persistent and addressable individual profile.

Do we have customer knowledge gaps that could be filled with trusted second- and third-party data?

First-party data is essential for building a strong relationship between your brand and customers. However, identity graphs using anonymized second- and third-party data can provide valuable demographic, location, financial and other information that can fill gaps in customer insights. As data collection and matching techniques improve, creating a 360-degree view of customers through identity resolution platforms may make sense.

Are we in compliance with CCPA, GDPR and other data privacy regulations?

Data breaches and misuse of consumer data continue to make headlines, leading to an increase in privacy regulations. It’s crucial to ensure your data governance practices comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and/or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). While collecting and using consumer data is an essential part of marketing, it also escalates the risk of damaging your brand and incurring legal consequences.

Can we successfully integrate our existing customer data systems with an identity resolution platform?

Your various martech and ad tech systems absolutely must be able to communicate with each other. If they can’t, your organization likely would benefit from an identity resolution platform. This platform can incorporate identifiers and profiles between and within these systems for consistency and accuracy, creating a persistent and addressable individual profile

Does our C-suite support identity resolution initiatives?

Most C-level executives overestimate their marketing organization’s customer identity accuracy and persistence, according to a Forrester study. This can lead to inadequate budgeting, campaign measurement and performance, and broken customer experiences. Therefore, it is critical to secure C-suite support for identity resolution initiatives across the organization.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

How would we use identity resolution?

Identity resolution has many marketing use cases, from complying with data privacy regulations to developing more accurate lookalike audiences to improved marketing segmentation and targeting. Identifying the use cases that would most benefit your organization is fundamental for establishing and prioritizing the capabilities you’ll need.

What KPIs do we want to measure and what decisions will we make based on the data?

It’s critical to measure the impact of an identity resolution platform on your marketing ROI. Resolving customer identities will provide new cross-sell and upsell opportunities because your marketing team knows more about your customers. Although KPIs vary by organization and/or industry, you should be able to measure incremental lift in metrics such as average order value, average revenue per user, basket size, response rates or customer retention.

What is the total cost of ownership?

Most of these platforms use on-demand pricing, meaning customers pay a monthly subscription price that will vary by usage. Pricing is typically based on the number of data records or customer profiles under management or the number of matches or API calls. Some also have add-on customer support options.

The post Does your organization need an identity resolution platform? appeared first on MarTech.

Identity resolution platforms enable marketers to “close the loop” on customer marketing, analytics and compliance with a comprehensive holistic view of activity across all of an organization’s customer touchpoints and channels. Such identifiers can and should encompass both online (device, email, cookie or mobile ad ID) and offline (name, address, phone number) data signals and attributes.

Why are these platforms important?

A number of key factors have promoted the importance of these platforms over the last couple of years.

Goodbye to third-party cookies

The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies and mobile identifiers, which tech companies are phasing out due to concerns about consumer privacy, are fueling interest in identity resolution platforms.

Marketers have long depended on third-party cookies and mobile IDs to target ads based
on data associated with these identifiers. As recently as mid-2021, 83% of marketers surveyed by Innovid were still using third-party cookies, and, for many marketers, their strategy was very reliant on this technology.

The walled gardens challenge

Marketers are also losing access to large pools of potential customer data due to the creation of “walled gardens” by Google, Facebook and Amazon. These closed ecosystems enable the marketplace providers to maintain control of user data.

All of these developments are driving marketers to step up their efforts to collect more first-party data about their customers and prospects, and also enhance their profiles in a privacy compliant manner.

The CTV opportunity

Advertising spending on connected TV (CTV) – which includes display ads on home screens as well as in-stream video ads on platforms like Hulu, Roku and YouTube – is the fastest-growing segment in digital advertising. Meanwhile, with Netflix and Disney Plus investing in ad-supported versions of their services, inventory is expanding to meet the demand.

Though advanced and connected TV aren’t hampered by a dependence on third-party cookies or mobile ad identifiers, the fragmentation of the sector means identity solutions are key to enabling the more advanced audience targeting sought by digital advertisers.

Let’s look at how identity resolution platforms can help marketers address all these challenges and opportunities.

Dig deeper: What is identity resolution and how are platforms adapting to privacy changes?

Main capabilities of identity resolutions platforms

Identity resolution platforms support marketing processes around targeting, measurement and
personalization for both known and anonymous audiences across digital and offline channels.
Virtually all enterprise identity resolution platform vendors offer the following core features and capabilities:

• Data onboarding (including online/offline matching).
• Proprietary identity graph.
• Client ownership of first-party data.
• Persistent individual and/or household ID.
• Compliance with data privacy regulations.
• APIs for third-party system integration.
• Pre-built connections to martech/adtech platforms.

Let’s look at the first two of those in more detail.

Data onboarding

Client data is typically onboarded via secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), although some vendors also provide direct API transfer or pixel syncs. Data is processed with the goal of establishing a universal view of the customer.

The aim is to support persistent customer IDs during the identity resolution process, which means the ID follows the individual (or household) even as identifiers change, which they inevitably do. For example, when browser cookies expire or are deleted, or customers buy and use new devices, the customer ID will remain the same.

Identity graphs

Most identity resolution vendors maintain a proprietary identity graph or database that houses all the known identifiers that correlate with individual consumers. There is no standard model for an identity graph.

Identity graphs may also incorporate demographic, behavioral, financial, lifestyle, purchase and other data compiled or licensed from third-party sources, such as online news sites, purchase transactions, surveys, email service providers (ESPs), motor vehicle records, voter registration and other public records.

Dig deeper: Marketers make identity solutions an urgent priority

The benefits of using identity resolution platforms

Connecting consumer identifiers has become a mandate for enterprise marketers trying to
meet or exceed customer expectations for a personalized brand experience. Automating the
process with an identity resolution platform can provide the following benefits:

• Deeper customer insights.
• Accurate personalization.
• More seamless customer experiences.
• Stronger privacy governance, risk and compliance.
• Enhanced cross-channel attribution and campaign tracking.
• Increased marketing ROI.

Learn more about the capabilities and benefits of this critical technology by downloading our free report.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

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