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Do marketeers need another three-letter acronym to add to the ever-growing list of tech stack terminology? We think they do. It’s time that marketing teams had more than just a CRM. Say hello to Clekt’s EDH (Enterprise Data Hub), a brand-new category, delivering smarter marketing that leverages ALL of your data.
The success of marketing is inextricably linked to fully leveraging data and technology. When it comes to engaging the market and understanding what’s driving ROI, the martech that underpins your data is everything. As a marketing leader today, you will certainly understand the need for a data-first approach. What’s more, you are no doubt acutely aware of the importance of making the right selection of technology to power your operation.
Your data needs to be of high quality, accessible in one place and in one format. Then, and only then, can you even begin to think about delivering truly customer-centric, data-driven marketing that has a real impact on business results. That’s the number one deliverable for your marketing tech stack.
No wonder that until now, the focus has been squarely on the CRM and potentially the CDP as the categories of choice for marketing. It’s worth taking a moment to recap on what these two types of data management platform deliver.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
In essence, a CRM platform records all of your interactions with your customer, bringing in data from all communication channels. Typically cloud-based, all CRM users can then access this customer transaction data in real-time, from anywhere for use in the Sales and Service cycle.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A CDP is a repository platform for all of your customer data. While there is a fair degree of overlap with a CRM, the two differ in that this is more about warehousing data and making it accessible to other martech systems.
Both types of platforms certainly play a crucial role in data-driven marketing, and building up that all important Customer 360. However, in the case of both categories of platform, this is about managing customer data and only customer data. The problem with that is that you are leaving a lot of customer-relevant information on the table. In fact, you could call it a Customer 180.
Imagine instead, if you could access the whole of your company data in real time to drive your marketing campaigns, not just your customer data.
You can’t do that with a CRM. Or a CDP. This is why we created the EDH.
Clekt’s Head of Sales, James Springham, explains why it’s the first of its kind
” EDH is a single data platform for both operational and analytical data, an engine for your company to better share and analyse its data across all business functions.
Too often in the past, retailers have built point to point integrations or bespoke data warehouses which have proved extremely expensive and not fit for purpose. This has left many retail businesses with lots of siloed data which is expensive to transfer between platforms and too inaccurate to meaningfully analyse, let alone take advantage of the promise of machine learning, data science and personalisation.
The Enterprise Data Hub is a modern solution which provides both a plug and play integration platform with a single view of data for reporting and analysis.”
A platform and a service
There is another important differentiator here though. The traditional platform model for CRM or CPD is for businesses to purchase licences, which will usually include some initial set up services accessed via a SI partner. After that, it’s down to them.
More ambitious, forward looking marketing teams know that’s simply not enough. A truly data-driven operation relies on the regular input of a range of data specialist skills, all informed with knowledge of your business, your data sources and your marketing use cases. Up until now, that setup has been prohibitively expensive for the majority of enterprises. Not anymore. By rolling data skills, storage, security and services into one subscription, the EDH for the first time offers a genuine solution for being data-driven at a realistic and sustainable price.
To sum up, choosing the right martech to drive smarter marketing has been a universal challenge, as one solution did not previously exist. That’s why we have created a new category with the Clekt Enterprise Data Hub.
If you would like to know more about how Clekt could work for your marketing organisation then please get in touch and we can showcase how leading CMOs are seeing success right now on the Clekt EDH.
