When implementing a new CDP, companies need a practical plan to identify and organize the data contained therein.
“The CDP is great, but it’s not magic,” said Amanda Cardona, owner of ALC Renaissance Consulting at the MarTech conference . “So it must have a clear recording process to help you activate in an efficient and clean way.”
CDP at the crossroads of travel infrastructure
The concept that marketers should keep in mind when planning the CDP implementation is called the “travel-infrastructure intersection,” Cardona explains. The CDP is located at this intersection.
Where does all this data come from? Cardona divides the data landscape into two main areas.
First, there is data that comes from the customer journey, where prospects and customers have opportunities to share first-party data with your company.
The data is captured from these outward-looking data sources and then organized internally. To effectively implement the CDP, these two sources must be aligned.
Understanding how the data flows from these two sources to the CDP can help ensure that the data is clean and usable, Cardona said.
Let’s take a closer look at these two areas.
Customer journey data
The customer journey data is any data that arises from outward opportunities.
“It could be from a contact, prospect, or visitor, whatever you call your specific customer,” Cardona says.
They interact with different touchpoints in the digital experience where they have the opportunity to share information. These can be found on a website, or delivered via social media. It can also be an email signup form.
Each of these actions the customer takes places them at a specific point in the customer journey. Customers who contact your organization by asking questions or making purchases are obviously more engaged than those who simply visit the site and create an account without taking any further action.
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When preparing to implement a CDP, marketing team members and other stakeholders must have a full understanding of all of these commitment points. They are weighted differently depending on the organization. As an organization, you must therefore ask yourself what it means if the customer or prospect communicates with your company on social media, for example.
“Is social media just an informational or acquisition game?” asked Cardona. “If someone fills out a lead form internally, does that qualify them as a warmer lead? You want to think about mapping that journey.”
Internal infrastructure for captured data
This leads to how that captured data is structured internally within your organization.
“Once that data is captured, what do you do with it?” asked Cardona. “Where is it going? Do you know the names of the systems that capture it? Do you know the names of the data fields?”
When mapping the internal infrastructure, you must first consider the systems that record the data. Are they third-party systems? Are there integrations? What kind of files is the data stored on?
With several proprietary systems capturing the data, there are also clear guidance and governance rules for data sharing.
After each of these systems has been identified, the implementation team must also identify who is using the data. Different taxonomies can be used by different teams, such as marketing or sales. Therefore, it is important to know how the data will be used, and also what the nomenclature is in the data fields, related to how the data is organized.
Finally, it is also important to know when the data is used. In which parts of the martech stack is the data activated for marketing functions?
“Your visitors will leave valuable information if you make it easy for them,” says Cardona. “Thinking about and framing the structure of where all those opportunities lie will be really helpful to your CDP implementation process.”
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Chris Wood has over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he was an associate editor, providing original analysis of the evolving marketing technology landscape. He has interviewed technology and policy leaders from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins to former Cisco CEO John Chambers and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the nation’s first federal CIO. He is particularly interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theatre” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry-related fields such as Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age, and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
