Making sense of customer data
A new article on Marketing Land asks whether data lakes and CDPs can
make better use of data sources. Not many businesses out there these days aren't connected to the web in some way. Most ventures rely on data to form ideas about potential and existing customers and develop strategies based on that. The article looks at the fact that even though there's much data available, making sense of it can be challenging.
Many marketers think you should base marketing on a single view about a customer across all platforms. To do that, however, you need a central hub for data - and that hasn't proven to be an easy task. CDPs got developed to handle customer profiling, but that created issues around what tools are truly CDPs. The CDP institute says:
This article asks whether you really need a CDP if your strategy and business is already
well-established. The idea is that you could use a 'data lake' to do the same job. Pat Maigler from Marketing Operations didn't take kindly to the idea when the author put it before him:
Maigler thinks that while it's necessary for marketers to assemble al their data in a single place, the task of analyzing and using the data is time-consuming. If that's the case, he says, then a single source of truth' do need all their customer data in one place, but if analyzing it and activating it remain time-consuming, then the 'single source of truth' theory isn't going to help. As he puts it: "You're better better off starting with your actionable endpoints. What's broken about your existing email engine that a CDP is going to provide?"
make better use of data sources. Not many businesses out there these days aren't connected to the web in some way. Most ventures rely on data to form ideas about potential and existing customers and develop strategies based on that. The article looks at the fact that even though there's much data available, making sense of it can be challenging.
Many marketers think you should base marketing on a single view about a customer across all platforms. To do that, however, you need a central hub for data - and that hasn't proven to be an easy task. CDPs got developed to handle customer profiling, but that created issues around what tools are truly CDPs. The CDP institute says:
| "(a) Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems." |
well-established. The idea is that you could use a 'data lake' to do the same job. Pat Maigler from Marketing Operations didn't take kindly to the idea when the author put it before him:
|
"To me, a data lake doesn't give marketers what they need. It gives them unstructured data, and then you need to be a data engineer...to translate it on the fly. In general, marketers have their own purpose-built endpoint systems, so I'm not sure a lot of the CDPs will fully replace the email engines that are being used. If you're already using somebody like LiveRamp as an on-boarder and they're syndicating to Google, Facebook [etc.] What do you really need" |
