The strategic role of identity resolution in marketing

In today’s digital age, where customer interactions span multiple platforms, channels, and devices, understanding your audience is more crucial than ever. This is where the concept of identity resolution comes into play. It stands as a linchpin in the realm of marketing and customer engagement, enabling brands to unravel the complexities of consumer identities across various touchpoints. At IDI, powerful technology is at our core. With advanced machine learning, a cloud-native platform, and a massive consumer data repository, IDI and our idiMARKETING solutions deliver AI-powered consumer intelligence that solves your most complex marketing challenges.

Delve into the intricacies of identity resolution, its significance in the marketing landscape, and the strategic role it plays in fostering meaningful, cohesive customer experiences. Read on to discover how identity resolution is reshaping the way brands connect with their customers, ensuring that every interaction is both insightful and impactful.

What is identity resolution?

Identity resolution, or the process of matching identifiers across devices and touchpoints to a single profile, helps to build a cohesive, omnichannel view of your consumers. Through this, your brand can deliver relevant, impactful messaging across the customer journey. Additionally, identity resolution offers the ability to recognize an entity—be it a person, place, or thing—along with associated relationships, consistently and accurately based on both physical and digital attributes, regardless of channel, location or device with contextually appropriate levels of precision.

The importance of identity resolution

The ability to accurately identify customers is the most basic prerequisite for marketing analytics, orchestration, and execution. Without identity resolution, you would have separate, incomplete customer profiles, likely stored in multiple silos. This leads to disjointed engagement campaigns and ultimately limits your ability to meaningfully connect and influence.

Identity resolution is a key enabler for contextual marketing by connecting multiple sources of identity and customer information to support robust targeting, personalization, and addressability across touchpoints and devices. It allows marketers to target the right audience with the right offer at the right time.

A strategic role in marketing

For customer-obsessed marketers, customer recognition in single channels isn’t enough; identity resolution spans every interaction and provides a broad view of the customer, creating the strategic foundation for cross-channel marketing. According to Forrester, “Identity resolution is the connective tissue for contextual marketing.”

Putting identity resolution to work

Collecting keys, syncing identities, and compiling profiles are not the end game. Identity resolution’s ultimate purpose is to support audience activation. Successful identity resolution accomplishes three key directives:

Recognize customers across devices and touchpoints
Put customer activities into context
Support relevant customer experiences

Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers leverage identity resolution today to enhance the breadth (via identity) and depth (via profiles) of many tasks spanning customer insights, journey orchestration, and experience delivery.            

Identity resolution emerges as an indispensable tool in the marketer’s arsenal, adeptly bridging the gap between scattered customer data and a unified, comprehensive customer view. Its role in enabling personalized, contextually relevant interactions across a multitude of channels and devices cannot be overstated.

By harnessing the power of identity resolution, brands can go beyond traditional marketing boundaries, orchestrating campaigns that resonate deeply with their audience. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the strategic implementation of identity resolution will not only enhance customer engagement but also pave the way for innovative marketing strategies and enduring customer relationships.

How idiMARKETING can help

idiMARKETING breaks down siloes to unite disparate data, helping to reveal previously unseen connections and opportunities. Using existing customer data—customer profiles, PII, and transaction footprints—in tandem with IDI’s industry-leading, AI/ML-powered identity intelligence platform and consumer identity graph, we connect billions of data points to build the most comprehensive insights and real-time analytics available.

Our solutions span consumer data, audiences, enrichment, contact data, customer segmentation, life event and in-market data, data cleansing and hygiene, and identity resolution and verification. Learn how idiMARKETING can help you deliver more successful campaigns and impactful messaging.