Introducing Spherical, the next-generation data platform to accelerate your customer data.It’s no surprise that customer data platforms (CDPs) are making a big splash in the global advertising industry. As marketing professionals focus on building up their first-party data, the CDP has become a valuable and essential data tool. But it’s important to remember, a CDP is only one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
In this New Digital Age piece, Lotame’s Chris Hogg discusses the key capabilities of a CDP, as well as its drawbacks. He seeks to answer a very key question: “How did this once-celebrated data tool’s reputation “come to be tarnished, and what place does it have in the future of customer insights?”
Read an excerpt below:
“The deprecation of the cookie that has dominated headlines in our corner of the world has led to a re-evaluation of first-party data as companies try to claw back lost insights. Many have turned to CDPs, which are great at managing customer data and connecting various data a brand has on a particular customer from different inputs within the company.
For many, CDP capabilities enable better engagement with existing customers. But in general, CDPs cannot help with new customer acquisition or provide any insights into prospect behaviour when they are not directly engaged with the business. A full-funnel marketing strategy requires a holistic view of both customer and prospect data which a CDP simply cannot provide on its own.
CDPs also aren’t powerful enough to plug the skills shortage in data analytics that is currently frustrating businesses across the globe. CDPs collect and sort data and present them cleanly, but valuable, actionable insights tend to be business-specific, which requires someone who can interpret, report, and mobilise data into something useful. Built-in insights aren’t going to do that.
CDPS are still relevant, if done correctly
CDPs get a lot of bad press, but marketers should not rush to unplug them. A CDP is a valuable and often essential data tool, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. Using a CDP correctly begins with the business looking at the data it already has at hand. A CDP can’t clean up bad data, so identity resolution should be carried out first to correct, merge, and enrich customer data before it is fed into the CDP to sort.”