A Customer Data Platform, or CDP, brings user-journey level fidelity to your marketing database. This provides a much better understanding of your customer’s interactions and paves a way for capturing their intent. In return, you can reach out and engage and convert prospects much more effectively.
If this is so valuable, why isn’t everybody using a CDP? Well, it comes down to volume and cost. CDPs such as Treasure Data have been out of reach for many smaller and medium-sized businesses due to their focus on managing enterprise-level data in a secure, fast, and precise way. This makes sense for established businesses with medium to high data volume and a rich channel interaction set. Breaking down the data silos across multiple channels like Google Display, Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram is paramount. A customer data platform can help with that.
There are basically three ways to use a CDP:
- Building your own CDP requires a lot of technical sophistication and a team of data engineers, data analysts, IT techs, and potentially software engineers. The process usually takes about 6 months to a year before you are operationally ready. This does not include applying your analytical insights to any campaigns yet. Plan on creating and testing your CDP powered marketing campaigns for at least 3-6 months before drawing any conclusions.
- You can leverage off-the-shelf platforms like Lytics from Portland, Oregon. Lytics has connectors that can link your data sources such as various providers in Advertising, Email, Mobile, Web Content, with your data warehouses like Google BigQuery. Overall, this is probably the most efficient way to get started, especially if your marketing team knows what they want.
- You can also work with marketing agencies that do it all for you. If you have an agency run all your activities across web, social, and advertising, you should enquire if they are using a CDP. If so, they should provide a central architecture and platform for your customer data. This should connect all your Google Analytics, Google Search, Google Ads, and Facebook ads with their CDP. Integrations with your offline and back-office systems are important.
We believe that Customer Data Platforms are key and improve your marketing; they strengthen relationships with your prospects and customers and help you comply with privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA.
At Bend.ai, we have helped medium-sized companies building their CDP or finding the right off-the-shelf system. Contact us if you are about to start your CDP journey. We are here to help you find the right fit for your company.
