Is a CDP a line item in your 2023 marketing budget?

Marketing departments globally have long struggled with data availability for timely actions, such as real time personalisation, campaign execution, customer service or case management. Despite it being a problem almost as old as marketing data itself, the siloed nature of data is a problem that is here to stay. In an ideal world sorting out data silos would be deemed essential to beating your competitors when it comes to customer share of wallet but we’re not quite there yet.

Because of this, marketers have found themselves making compromise after compromise with what little they can obtain from internal and external data sources, ranging from data warehouses, eCommerce platforms, social media, CRM solutions and a host of other sources.

I’ve often talked about MarTechnical Debt, whereby marketing decision makers have made software (and sometimes hardware) decisions with the absolute best of intentions, that have not exactly stood the test of time. In many cases, those who made the decisions that marketers are living with the fallout from, are not even in the business anymore.

Why are CDPs the answer?

The CDP (Customer Data Platform) therefore represents a step change for the modern marketer, a quantum leap forwards in data accessibility, actionability and privacy management, leading to a hugely improved understanding of who your customer really is, what drives and motivates them, and just as importantly, what they find annoying, or a turn-off when it comes to interacting with your brand.

The utopian promise of data unification the CDPs bring is in itself nothing new. I distinctly remember working on such projects in the early 2000s but the key to unlocking this potential without a multi-million-pound IT budget is in the three-stage process that most CDPs follow:

1. Real time consumption of marketing data from hundreds of concurrent data sources, and effective identify resolution to combine them
2. Analysis of data, ranging from segmentation to machine learning
3. Taking action to increase your customer engagement (and therefore revenue), and reduce your churn

CDPs are here to stay, I’m glad to say. They solve a critical problem of data availability that too many marketers have learned to live with, that drastically limits their ability to beat out the competition to share of wallet, consumes time that they would otherwise spend innovating, and lets them see the opportunities they didn’t even know they were missing to do right by their customers. In fact, if I had a pound for every time I’d been asked about CDP while in meetings with clients and prospects this year, I wouldn’t be writing thought leadership on the subject!