Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from n3 Hub

N3 Hub is shaking up the marketing technology sector with its customer data platform, aiming to put firms back in control of their data and to enable more targeted engagement with customers.

Speaking on Two Minute IT Jams, Damien Williams, Chief Technology Officer at N3 Hub, explained how the company is helping enterprise marketing teams generate actionable insights and design more successful campaigns - all underpinned by a robust data-driven approach.

"We offer two primary offerings on the market. The first is our customer data platform, a proprietary bit of marketing technology software which will ingest data from any data source and use that to create what we call a single customer view," Williams said.

This single view allows users to segment and analyse their customer data, sharing insights and audiences with a wide range of downstream marketing platforms. The aim is to facilitate more relevant, timely conversations with customers, Williams added.

The second pillar of N3 Hub's strategy is its marketing operations services, which help customers actually make use of the data within its platform. "Mainly, it's through mapping automation platforms or through data analysis and acquisition," he added.

A focus on orchestration

The most recent advance for N3 Hub is in the field of orchestration - a critical area as marketing becomes more complex and fragmented.

"Historically, customer data platforms have really been tools used to bring data together and to segment it, then be able to share those segments with other platforms. But increasingly, they're being used to orchestrate complex journeys across multiple different channels and platforms," Williams explained.

N3 Hub's approach, what it calls 'cross-platform orchestration,' allows clients with multiple marketing platforms from different vendors to coordinate customer journeys across all of them. "Our CDP can orchestrate the journeys across all those different platforms by providing the data to those platforms in the format they need, when they need it, to trigger the experiences that they deliver to the customers," he said.

Williams said there is now increased demand for this central coordination. In the past, orchestration occurred within individual channels, but with customer journeys now spanning paid media, web personalisation, direct communication, and social media, channel-specific orchestration cannot guarantee a consistent user experience.

"Centralising it, where the data is centralised, is becoming more popular," Williams said, noting that N3 Hub's new orchestration product is currently in beta testing and scheduled for public release later this year. "That is really our answer to that demand in the market," he added.

Putting customers in control

One of the principal issues facing N3 Hub's clients, according to Williams, is data ownership. For too long, he said, marketing departments have simply handed over their data to agencies or vendors - only to find themselves locked in, unable to move platforms without extensive rebuilding.

"A lot of marketing departments have been happy to offload data to agencies and other platform vendors and things like that," he explained. "All that provides is lock-in. If you decide you want to move from those agencies or those platforms, you've got to rebuild from scratch because the data is actually somewhere else."

Williams emphasised that this was a key differentiator for N3 Hub. "One of our big unique selling points is the fact that customers own the data on our platform," he said. N3 Hub is not tied to any marketing agency or downstream platform, meaning "our customers control [the data] and they can access whatever data is held within the platform - they can extract it, augment it, or whatever they want to do."

This open-handed approach, Williams pointed out, gives businesses the flexibility to adapt to new technologies and platforms without being reliant on the sometimes plodding 'roadmaps' of major marketing technology vendors. "Sometimes you can't wait for a marketing cloud vendor's roadmap to catch up. You need to be able to get a platform that can deliver to that, and so we can help marketers move at the pace of the market rather than the pace of the vendor's roadmap," he said.

Anticipating industry trends

Looking ahead, Williams said that deeper integration into a wider range of paid media channels is on the horizon for N3 Hub, reflecting changing industry trends.

"The big trend we're seeing at the moment is, historically, customer data platforms like ours have been used to drive marketing automation and direct communication campaigns such as email, SMS, or push notifications. Now, those types of campaigns are being augmented with paid media, social, and web personalisation," he noted.

With third-party cookies becoming less viable for tracking and remarketing, first-party data is now considered essential. Williams explained, "First-party data is being seen very much as the answer to that. Customer data platforms are always held as holding that data securely and able to share it securely, so there's a lot more demand for us to be able to integrate into those platforms."

As the marketing landscape evolves, N3 Hub is positioning itself as a flexible, independent hub for data management and orchestration, empowering customers rather than locking them in to a proprietary ecosystem. The company's focus on supporting best-of-breed marketing stacks is likely to appeal both to established enterprises and to those keen to keep pace with rapid change.

Asked how interested businesses can find out more, Williams said, "Probably the best way is to start with our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn...and we're quite active in a range of different marketing and technology publications and industry publications as well. So keep an eye out for things as they pop in our LinkedIn channel or our blog."

Williams concluded, "We can help marketers move at the pace of the market rather than the pace of the vendor's roadmap."