The job of marketers, tasked with delivering advertising campaigns that convert prospects, lapsed customers and current customers into additional revenue streams, has never been as challenging as it is now. Part of that challenge lies in the ever-increasing ways consumers can engage with your brand and potentially be reached through marketing activity.
As we covered in a previous blog, today’s consumer moves between multiple devices and online content services throughout their day, and first-party customer data is often collected at each point. Building a complete picture of consumer behaviour, therefore, presents a significant challenge. The below graphic illustrates a typical day in an individual’s life.
Identity resolution exists as a way to connect the dots between these various devices and content services to build a unified view of customer engagement.
Joining the dots across your first-party data sources
Within a modern business, data is likely being collected about your prospects and customers across multiple systems and business divisions. For example, the marketing team will have a clear understanding of consumer behaviour across web and app analytics. While the sales team will have a good understanding of who has converted through point-of-sale data in a CRM.
Without a unified understanding of these two common data silos, it is possible that marketing will be actively targeting and engaging with individuals who have already converted. We’ve all experienced the frustration of being followed around the web by adverts for a product we’ve already purchased (or indeed decided we didn’t want!).
Identity resolution is the process of connecting multiple identifiers across different devices and platforms. This process enables each of the data points created by these different devices and platforms to be associated to a single individual. By resolving individual profiles across these various data silos you can build a unified customer view and not only ensure you’re not wasting advertising budget by targeting individuals who have already converted but also truly understand the demographic and behavioural attributes that make up your customers profile.
One way that identity resolution can truly benefit your marketing, is where it can be used to drive people-based marketing activity. Identity resolution enables you to identify your target audience across the digital advertising ecosystem to deliver the right message, to the right individual, at the right time.
First-party data onboarding - without the pain of centralising data
Once a unified customer view has been built, bringing that knowledge and insight into the advertising ecosystem requires that data to be onboarded. While first-generation data onboarding solutions have required your data to be centralised against their identity graphs to enable the identity vendor to resolve identities within their environment, InfoSum is revolutionising this approach.
InfoSum’s privacy-first approach to identity and the data onboarding process enables you to deterministically match your first-party customer data directly against a media owner's audience. All without having to move or share any personal data.
Your first-party customer data remains firmly in your control within your private Bunker. Only you can ever access this Bunker but, through anonymous mathematical representations of the data set, the identities within your data can be matched with a third-party identity graph.
Once identities have been matched, a custom audience can be created and used to power your people-based marketing campaigns.
Second-party audiences
With more and more media owners building their own authenticated addressable audience, new and exciting second-party data opportunities are becoming available.
Similar to the way identities are matched to a third-party identity graph, InfoSum enables your first-party customer data to be matched directly against a media owner's addressable audience. You can then build a custom audience that can both be used to target specific individuals across the media owners audience and also used as a seed audience for lookalike modelling.
Additionally, a third-party identity graph can be used as an ‘identity bridge,’ if needed, to boost the match rates between your first-party data, and the media owners audience. This can be powerful where, for example, a common identifier is not shared.
All of this happens without you, the media owner or the identity graph provider having to share or move any customer personal data.
Decentralised identity resolution
Your first-party customer data is one of your company’s most valuable assets. So handing control and potentially ownership of that data over to a third party, doesn’t make commercial sense. It is therefore only through a decentralised approach that you can build a sustainable advertising strategy that delivers increased revenue while also respecting the privacy of your customers.
If you’re ready to get started on your decentralised journey, find out more about InfoSum’s data clean room and how it can help you deliver more powerful people-based marketing in a privacy-first era.
