Power To The People: How To Take Control Of Your Marketing Data Using A CDP

Lynne Capozzi is CMO at digital experience company Acquia, where she oversees all global marketing functions. 

Customer data is one of a marketer’s most valuable assets — so why is it so often “owned” by a handful of tech staffers? When marketers and other business users need access to the data, they’re forced to go through the overburdened IT team, which means that requests can take days or weeks. With a new viral trend or new technology commanding attention every day, that long of a delay can cause your data to become out-of-date and lose value.

To benefit from the insights that data can provide, it’s important that everyone in the organization has access to relevant data. Ensuring equal access to data is known as data democratization, and businesses shouldn’t ignore it.

Let’s take a closer look at the costs associated with keeping data siloed and explore how to make data democratization happen. 

The Cost Of Siloed Data

Delivering digital experiences requires that all hands are on deck. If you’re still keeping your data siloed and firmly under the control of the IT department, you may end up paying a steep price to maintain the status quo:

• Decreased efficiency: When organizations restrict data to a single department, efficiency can tank.

• Reduced technical innovation: Keeping data behind a gate means your IT and development teams may spend much of their time fulfilling business user requests. If your IT team is busy fixing font sizes or tweaking images on a web page, they’ll have less time to dedicate to developing new features or fulfilling product road maps.

• Loss of responsiveness: When tech teams control marketing priorities, time to market may be exponentially slower — sometimes to the point that the opportunity passes and the campaign isn’t worth launching because it is no longer relevant.

• Disappointing customer experiences: Few things irritate customers more than interacting with a company that should know them but doesn’t. After all, we’ve all felt the frustration of explaining our issue repeatedly to a long line of customer support reps. Unfortunately, if your organization holds customer data hostage — and makes it available only to a select few — data may need to be reconfirmed multiple times, and it’s your customers who will suffer.

• No single source of truth: In siloed data situations, data one department gathers may radically differ from data other departments gather. This can create a sense of distrust in the data in general. When marketers can’t trust that the experiences they’re creating are meaningful, how can we expect our customers to?

Why It’s Important For Marketers To Gain Access To Insights

Clearly, working through a middleman to get insight into customer behavior isn’t a great solution. So how does your organization avoid the consequences of data silos and work toward data democratization? First, you need to figure out what data you actually have and develop a clear data strategy. Some factors to evaluate here include the complexity of your customer segments, misalignment in customer messaging between departments like sales and marketing, and the overall accuracy and cleanliness of all your data.

If your marketing teams can’t get immediate insights into important customer trends and preferences and you feel like your business is always a few steps behind in launching the next campaign, you may want to consider investing in a solution that centralizes data and offers immediate customer insights.

One option that organizations are turning to is a customer data platform or CDP. (Full disclosure: My company offers a CDP.) According to MarketsandMarkets research (via PR Newswire), the CDP market size could grow from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $15.3 billion by 2026. A CDP can serve as your company’s single source of truth by gathering data from multiple sources and providing a 360-degree view of each customer, including data points like purchase history, content preferences and brand interactions. However, not all CDPs are created equal. Before evaluating which tools will best serve your goal of data democratization, it’s critical to understand how your employees can get the most out of a CDP to achieve their end goals of delivering better customer experiences faster and at scale. 

What To Consider To Ensure You Choose The Right Data Tool

With the rising number of CDP offerings and other data management tools on the market, it can be difficult to understand what capabilities you need to deliver consistent, data-driven experiences. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when evaluating which customer data platform is right for your needs.

1. Will this tool help you meet essential data privacy and compliance regulations?

With more data privacy laws being enacted every year, businesses need to ensure they’re following regulations — or they could face damaging legal consequences, not to mention lose customer trust. Make sure you understand how solutions will unify your data and standardize that data via methods like identity resolution. Ask the provider how they will manage your data and how you can maintain governance over any customer data requests.

2. Are you empowered to pull and activate your own data? 

A CDP should make your marketing team’s lives easier, not more complicated. Some vendors offer products that require third-party experts or data scientists to pull the needed information. If your team doesn’t have those resources available, make sure the technology helps shorten the path from strategy to execution with real-time, self-service customer insights.

3. Are you prepared to adapt to new customer expectations in the future?

Static CDP offerings only allow marketers to choose from a fixed set of data modules, which can limit the insights your team is able to gain. To ensure your CDP is ready to grow with your business and your customers, you should ask the provider whether you can adapt your use cases and anticipate new behaviors. For example, what machine learning models and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities do they offer?

Delivering Exceptional Digital Experiences

At the end of the day, it’s all about using the data you’re collecting to deliver exceptional digital experiences to your customers. By ensuring that all of your teams have access to accurate, actionable data, you’ll be better able to create and deliver relevant, highly personalized customer experiences.

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