Assessing Your Need for a Customer Data Platform

Would a customer data platform (CDP) help your organization? To determine that you need to assess your business needs, staff capabilities, management support and financial resources. CDPs have become more prevalent as marketers face increasing pressure to provide a unified experience to customers across many channels. They help marketers identify key data points from customers across platforms, which can be invaluable data. However, another tool you’re using may already handle some of the CDP functionality you’re seeking.

Knowing this, you need to do a comprehensive self-assessment to determine the answers. How do you currently manage customer data? Is third-party anonymous data mixed in? How many applications are in your martech stack? How efficient are your marketing data processes? Are you spending more time normalizing data or executing campaigns? What would having a single view of your customers do for you? Are you confident all teams involved can be educated on the potential value of a CDP? What systems would you integrate through the CDP? How will you define and benchmark CDP success? Do you have management buy-in? Do you need self-serve, full-serve or something in between? What is the total cost of ownership?

These are all areas where a CDP can help to standardize and streamline data storage and processing. The majority of CDP vendors are both ISO and SOC certified for best practices in handling personally identifiable information (PII). Benefits include expanded enterprise collaboration, improved data accessibility, streamlined systems integration, increased marketing efficiency, faster marketing velocity, stronger regulatory compliance, and more.

Before investing in a CDP develop use cases that demonstrate how adoption will improve marketing performance or reduce costs. Make sure you understand what your marketing staff will need to know to effectively use the CDP, or if you lack internal resources, what type of managed services are available. Set business goals in advance to be able to benchmark success later on. Start with small, short-term goals that demonstrate how the CDP is benefiting the business, and convince senior executives that having a single, unified view of the customer will add to the organization’s bottom line.

Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/does-your-company-really-need-a-cdp/
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