A Customer Data Platform to Rule Them All: How Marketers Can Manage Data Using a CDP
With the eventual and final phase out of the third-party cookie, marketers will need to rely on the data they can collect directly from consumers. This first- and -zero-party data will come from a multitude of sources and, if not managed properly, can end up as a disorganized, in-actionable mess.
Enter the Customer Data Platform, which grew from the more familiar Data Management Platform, to centralize, organize, and house all of this disparate data in a way that it can be disseminated and made useful to marketers. The resources here discuss CDP uses, benefits, selection, and how they've changed in the wake of the pandemic.
- Customer Data Platforms – the Stats You Can't Ignore. V12 Data, September 2021.
Brands are increasingly turning to customer data platforms as a way to get ahead in such a volatile economic climate. Why is this and what are some of the benefits CDPs offer? A persistent, unified customer view is what marketers strive for and which provides the foundation for many marketing initiatives, such as better customer experiences, stronger engagement, richer customer journeys, and even an understanding of what consumers may be in market for. V12 dives into the stats to get a better understanding of the usefulness of a CDP. - Power to the People: How to Take Control of Your Marketing Data Using a CDP. Forbes, October 2021.
Customer data is one of a marketer's most valuable assets — so why is it so often "owned" by a handful of tech staffers? When marketers and other business users need access to the data, they're forced to go through the overburdened IT team. This means that requests can take days or weeks. With a new viral trend or new technology commanding attention every day, that long of a delay can cause your data to become out-of-date and lose value. To benefit from the insights that data can provide, it's important that everyone in the organization has access to relevant data. Ensuring equal access to data is known as data democratization, and businesses shouldn't ignore it. Forbes looks at the costs associated with keeping data siloed and explores how to make data democratization happen through a CDP. - 6 Ways Customer Data Platforms Can Help Create Unified Customer Experiences. Digital Commerce 360, October 2021.
Today, organizations interact with their customers through various touchpoints, from a website live chat to a social feed, from mobile applications to wearable devices and more. As a result, customer data comes in more fragmented ways at an unprecedented rate. Marketing teams struggle to integrate and operationalize such fragmented customer data for executing their campaigns at speed and scale. When it comes to running multichannel marketing campaigns, the challenge gets even bigger. Another obstacle is augmenting existing customer profiles with additional data. Customer data platforms (CDPs) present an exciting option for marketers hindered by the limitations of their current technology in handling customer data management and customer analytics capabilities. - How to Choose and Implement a CDP. MarTech.
Given the changing marketing landscape, having a holistic understanding of customers is essential. This is why more businesses are turning to customer data platforms (CDPs) to help improve their efforts. "Last year, 2020, just accelerated the digital growth across the world," said Ekta Chopra, CDO at e.l.f. Beauty, in her recent MarTech presentation. "You're swimming in data, but 75 percent of that data is not actionable. 13% is aggregated and everything else is probably not. And 44 percent of the data is not real-time." Storing and collecting vast amounts of customer data isn't enough. Your organization's CDP needs to provide actionable insights as well. - How the Customer Data Platform Industry Reconfigured During COVID. CMS Wire, October 2021.
Organizations were forced by the pandemic to accelerate their existing digital transformation plans in order to react to the fact that most of their customers were now primarily interacting with them through digital channels. All of this new digital-centric behavior has increased the volume, velocity, depth and variety of customer data across all channels. With the increase in data volume from all of these touchpoints, it has become even more critical for companies to build a customer data foundation using a CDP that can connect to all customer-facing systems, ingest and unify the data, make it available for analytics, and allow companies to create data-driven, personalized customer journeys.
Josch Chodakowsky is a senior manager of research and innovation at ANA.
The views and opinions expressed in Marketing Futures Pulse are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
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