Does your company really need a CDP? 

What are your ways to avoid being a disappointed marketer? Do you have certain ways and methodologies to uphold the continuous success of your company, or you wait for someone to lend you help? Well, it is highly suggested that you consult an excellent resource to help you achieve more, just like the MarTech Intelligence Report: A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms. 

Digital Marketing Depot and MarTech Today are going to release its second edition as an honor of the occasion. Here, there will be a sharing of comprehensive tips and reports, but it is required to have the marketplace overview and awareness of 25 leading CDP vendors today. 

Now, before we jump to the bandwagon of CDP, let yourself first realize if the following questions below are ensuring that you require a CDP and that your company has enough courage to face its benefits. So, let us now start! 

How is customer data being managed? 

The pieces of customer data that were fragmented are being put in silos in sales, marketing, customer support, purchasing, and other departments. Do you have a network of records in your company? Have you any idea of the components included in customer data? Are there and how many systems are stuck in your MarTech? Is there a mixture of 3rd-party anonymous data? How does your data transfer from one system to another? All of these are the areas where CDP helps to streamline and standardize processing and storage. 

How efficient are your marketing data processes? 

Systems of Martech are meant to improve campaign and data efficiency; however, there are times wherein disparate systems lead to a lack of standardization, data duplication, and an increase in time-consuming manual tasks. Suppose you ever find yourself spending lots of time just to correct errors in data or de-duplicating the contact record and less in evaluating campaign performance or executing campaigns. In that case, it is time for you to automate data integration. 

What are the use cases for the technology, and how can CDP address the needs of a company? 

Virtually, CDPs deliver core capabilities within data management, yet some also provide a wide range of orchestration features and data analytics to address the diverse goals of a company. What are the potential benefits of viewing customers for your company? For example, if you are looking forward to reducing churn by targeting customers who have more relevant and competitive offers? What if there is an increase in the profitability of customers’ acquisition efforts through the creation of lookalike and more accurate audiences? Do not invest unless you are certain enough that the CDP can provide better performance compared to other systems. 

Is your company ready to embrace and use a CDP? 

Does your company has enough clarity on customer journeys and use cases to enable you to select the best and correct solution? How will audience definition and centralizing your data impact your company? Do you have enough confidence to ensure that the team will all succeed in their involvement in customer service, IT, and marketing, as well as if they are educated about the CDP’s potential value? In an early time, have you already chosen the adopters within your company to provide other users with proof points? 

What system can integrate through a CDP? 

The stack of MarTech is getting more complex and bigger for lots of organizations and companies. In the implementation of a CDP, streamlining integrations is the core benefit. This can helps in normalizing the data for easier exporting and importing into other systems. As there is an increasing brand engagement in omnichannel marketing through the applications of MarTech, such as marketing automation systems, call analytics platforms, CRMs, and DMPs, there will be the creation of a unified view of customers, as well as making it critical to the success of marketing. 

How is CDP defined and then benchmarked? 

What are the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators that you are looking forward to measuring, and what are the decisions that you’ll possibly make on the implementation of CDP? For example, are you looking forward to tracking the impacts on the velocity of campaign executions and data redundancy? Or do you want to reduce the time spent by your marketing staff in transferring data manually from one to another system? An advanced set of company goals to benchmark, later on, will guarantee success. 

Is there management buy-in? 

In any investment done by a company, management support plays an important role in the CDP success – beginning with short-term and small goals to demonstrate the performance of CDP in providing benefits to companies and businesses. It can either be through revenue gains or cost savings. The only key here is to convince the senior executives that a unified and single view of customers can provide additional benefits to the company’s bottom line. 

Are self-serve and full-serve needed? Or just something in between? 

Marketing end-users are the main focus of how CDPs are built. However, it can have variations in the scope of capabilities, so it is only vital to gain a level of ongoing training to later use it all. The vendors of CDP provide various levels of customer support, professional services, and onboarding. Just make sure that you can understand the needed things and knowledge of your marketing staff to use CDP effectively. If your internal resources are lacking, what will be an available type of managed services?

How much is the total cost of ownership? 

Vendors of CDP are charged typically with monthly license fees depending on the data records, integrated applications, events, and customer actions. Additional fees may still be charged for staff training, custom integrations, and onboarding. After all, you need to make sure that the needs and data volume of your company are well-understood to see the potential investments that your company can create shortly. 

Now that you already have an idea about CDP, it can be deduced that it is needed to enable companies to reach their goals and missions.