Do You Need CDP?
What is CDP
CDP is abbreviation of Customer Data Platform. This is an emerging product in the digital marketing area. Along with the growth of digital citizens, more and more transctions taking place within the digital territory. Brands are learning to accumulate the digital customer paces and track the customers across different platforms. To define CDP there are 3 key features. * CDP is able to track customers across omnichannels * CDP is fully functioned to segment audiences according to the defined rules. * CDP should be able to act as the marketing brain to run workflow through the brand entire marketing architecture. As we can tell, CDP is not the traditional platform to store customer data but it acts as the brain of the full marketing chains.
How to tell CDP from DMP
DMP, which is short for Data Management Platform, was once the host word in all the decks of digital marketing industry. Brands were building their own DMP to store customers data and push those segemented audience groups to marketing platforms for all their campaigns. Within such scenarios, data works only as the fuel of the campaign. Marketers relied on it to monitor campaigns and measure the campaign performance. It’s the material of the marketing events but not the elements to drive the marketing workflow. CDP takes the role as data platform as well, but it’s not traditional DMP. Within the evolution of the data platform, there are 3 generations of them taking the position on the stage. The first generation is CRM, of which the concept has been obsolete for a while. The 2nd generation is DMP. Along with the rise of digital markeing, DMP took the position of offer collecting , storing and segmenting audience data. CDP is the 3rd generation of data platform. The most distinct feature of it is the capability to drive marketing events no matter which channel they are happening. Hence ,we can call the marketing workflows driven by CDP is data-driven marketing campaigns.Such is the major distiguishing point of CDPS versuas its previous generations.
How is CDP able to drive the campaigns.
I believe you are curious about how CDP can drive the marketing campaigns. The distinguishing feature is supported by two key functions below, * Connectivity * Marketing automation In terms of connectivity, it refers to integration with upstream and downstream components. For example, CDP shoudl be able to connect with social media and marketing campaign execution platforms. It’s able to collect the data from social media and push those segmentation to the execution platform to reach out to the targeted audience group. The the CDP products are able to connect with multiple digital territories natively before delivery as well as the capability to integrate all the other platforms via APIs. Marketing automation is not an emerging concept in the digital marketing area. However, marketing automation I mentioned here is fully driven by CDP according to the instance data collections and performance measurement. Previously, data collection and performance measurement are divided into different marketing components. In such case, efficiency was sacrificed. To the opposite, CDP can gather all the functions in one place. It improve the execution efficiency and decrease the loss caused by data transportation among different components.
What are scenario to use CDP
Since we’ve already shared the distinction of CDP, let’s share more about the scenarios that CDP can fit in. To tell whether you need CDP or not, you can consider the scenarios covered against your daily requirement. If , at least, one of them hits your requirement list, I believe it’s worthy to migrate your data from your current platform to CDP.
Audience data segmentation
Segmentation is the entry level functions of CDP. However, there are still several emphasis. The first one is the instant update, which refers to how fast the CDP is able to update the segmented audience. In the meanwhile, the audience groups generated by CDP are not one-shot deal. CDP will maintain the rope like the kite update the segmetation groups periodically no matter where they are in use.
Marketing platform integration
Integration is one of the key indicator to tell how flexible a CDP product is. Nowadays, most of CDP are able to connect with well-known marketing platforms, but very few of them offers the ability to customize the integration with the all the ones that are available to get integrated. The simplicity of second-development on the platforms should be considered. Some products relies on upgrade committed by SaaS providers but some adopts more variant ways that enable brand team to develope the interface in house with low cost.
Marketing automation
Finally, we come to the core function of CDP, marketing automation. Previously, the marketing automation is implemented on so-called marketing cloud which is different component from DMP. The communication between the two costs extra efforts and definitely causes data loss. But within CDP , it’ll work as the brain of the each campaign. With the ability to collect data from omnichannels and integration with multiple marketing execution platforms, CDP can close the marketing loop from planning a campaign to measure the performance. In addition, CDP is able to improve the campaign setup iteratively base on instant data stream companied with evolotionable strategy.
What do you need to know before deployment
As we can see there are tremendous superiority to deploy CDP comparing to DMP, the cost still need counting before migration. If your brand is considering deploying CDP, please review the checklist below, * What’s the size of your data and the structure of the data that’ll be migrated. The size of the data determines the time span to migrate and the structure determines what to do with your data before migration that will definitely cost much. Additionally, you need to figure out whether to prepare a separate storage space to feed the data in. * List out all the channels where your team need to collect data from and push segmented audience to. Align the list with CDP technical provider before nail down the contract. * Define the timeframe of the data updates. Given the size of the data, whenever data gets updated, the process will cost some resources as well. If the size is too big, the brand can consider increamental updates frequently and full updates periodically to save cost. * Align the SOP with technical provider before deployment. Most of CDP products are offered by SaaS provider. Therefore, it’s critical to make a agreemnt on the SOP and SLP before deployment. If you’ve already done all above, you can move on with next steps and push the red button to launch it.
What’s next with CDP
Since CDP product is still evolving. Its ability to adapt to variant types of marketing components empowering it to dominant the marketing area for a long period. With the rise of GenAI, CDP can automate more and improve more aspects of marketing campaign in the AI era around the corner.