Colby Custer
Author

Colby Custer

Writing for the iCustomer Blog on agentic GTM, decision intelligence, and the systems behind better marketing.

Articles by Colby Custer

Composable CDP

What Is Identity Resolution? The Core CDP Mechanism Explained

The same buyer shows up in your data as five strangers. Identity resolution is how a CDP turns them back into one person, or one account.

Colby Custer 7 min
Audience Segmentation

How to Use Intent Data to Identify Sales-Qualified Leads

Fit tells you who might buy. Intent data tells you when. Here is how the FIRE framework combines both into a real sales-qualified lead signal.

Colby Custer 7 min
Composable CDP

Reverse ETL Tools Compared: Hightouch, Census, RudderStack, and Fivetran

Reverse ETL tools move data one way and stop. Here's how the leading platforms compare on coverage, pricing, and setup, and where a real-time activation loop fits.

Colby Custer 6 min
Composable CDP

How Do You Choose Between Building and Buying a Customer Data Platform?

Should you build or buy a customer data platform? Real cost drivers, when each option makes sense, and a third path that avoids the trade-offs entirely.

Colby Custer 6 min
Always-On Intelligence

How I Run Marketing Ops and Paid Media With iHarness

A day-in-the-life account of running marketing ops and paid media on iHarness: loops that observe, decide, and act on the audience around the clock, and surface only the decisions that need a human.

Colby Custer 8 min
GTM Decision Intelligence

LinkedIn Micro-Campaigns: Win the Segment, Not the Feed

Broad-reach LinkedIn campaigns work if you have a big budget and patience for 0.4% CTRs. Most growth teams have neither. Here is a segment-by-segment alternative built on live buying signals.

Colby Custer 5 min
Audience Segmentation

What Is Audience Intelligence?

A decision system that scores customers in real time, activates across channels, and learns from every result, not another analytics report.

Colby Custer 7 min
Causal Decisioning

How to Measure Incremental Conversions from Meta Ads

Last-touch attribution makes Meta look like a hero. Conversion Lift and Incremental Attribution ask the harder question, and neither one is a complete answer on its own.

Colby Custer 6 min
Audience Segmentation

How Do You Evaluate an Audience Intelligence Platform?

Feature checklists and demo scores rarely predict whether a platform will move campaign performance. Six criteria that do, and how to test each one before you sign.

Colby Custer 8 min
Causal Decisioning

Why Connecting Your CRM to Claude Is a Bad Idea

Claude will answer confidently no matter how messy your CRM is. That confidence is the problem. Here are three ways a chat interface breaks when it sits directly on unmanaged customer data, and what should sit between the two instead.

Colby Custer 8 min