Should I invest in a customer data platform (CDP) or not?While almost every marketing department would benefit from having a CDP, this quick, four-question, decision-making guide can help you find the answer and, if it’s “yes,” choose wisely and well.

Can I view all our data on a single platform?If you pull data from multiple sources, rely heavily on your tech team to extract usable information, or struggle to get a 360° view of your customer, a CDP could make your work life infinitely easier and improve performance significantly.When email engagements, social media interactions, text responses, and push notification feedback are stored in different sources, it’s easy to miss the crucial pieces of customer behavioral data required to build the full story.

This difficulty is exacerbated when unstructured and third-party data are pulled into the mix.If you find yourself spending hours pulling data from each channel after each campaign deployment and piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle to see the complete picture, it’s time to consider investing in a customer data platform.The ability to view all your data on a single platform also empowers robust reporting and enables you to map, evaluate, and analyze data gathered across different touchpoints.

In an age where personalization can separate the winners from the also-rans, effective marketing requires greater precision driven by demographic, behavioral, psychographic, transactional, campaign interaction, and other types of valuable customer data.Achieving such a sophisticated level of segmentation goes beyond simply acquiring a garden variety CDP.

You’re going to need a strong, flexible customer data platform that can empower data manipulation in a seamless, straightforward, hassle-free process.By revealing the potential reach, engagement, and conversion rates of a target segment based on past interactions and real-time insights, it will be easier than ever to calculate ROI, set accurate goals, and create personally relevant messaging to achieve true outcome-driven marketing.Another advantage of advanced audience segmentation is the ability to create lookalike profiles based on the traits of your customers with the highest lifetime value (LTV).

Does our CRM do enough to meet all our needs?If you simply need to manage your sales pipeline and determine prospect engagement with your sellers, and if your organization is a B2B account focusing on large accounts rather than individual customers, a CRM might suffice.

Google, Apple, and Amazon are dominating because they have developed and continuously honed customer-centric strategies to eliminate any and all frictions in their CX.

Conversely, it is expected that up to 40% of current S 500 companies may not exist in the next decade due to a lack of innovation and the failure to keep pace with this shift.The modern-day digital marketing juggling actDigital marketing has rapidly moved from managing a single company website to overseeing a complex ecosystem of digital channels including web, search, display ads, social, email, SMS, mobile, and a variety of emerging touchpoints.

These challenges include:Fragmented offline-to-online interactionsDifficulty in pulling together vast amounts of data scattered across siloed sourcesLack of tools to contextualize how each customer is engaged in real-time and across touchpointsHowever, this presents an opportunity for future-focused companies to deliver sustainable growth through a business-wide commitment towards real-time omnichannel transformation.The complexity of the CX that needs to be weaved across all these disparate channels requires much more than just a series of cobbled-together legacy systems.

Map out the steps in your marketing transformationComplete a thorough audit of where your marketing and data management maturity currently stands.

Examine existing processes and map out user experiences, with an eye towards identifying the technology enhancements required to deliver the ideal set of individualized customer journeys at scale.

Build a solid data hubDelivering personalized CX at scale requires a powerful data engine.Sophisticated marketers know one of a company’s most valuable assets is its first-party data — e.g., recent purchases, location, demographics — as well as second-party data, which captures how people have interfaced with various marketing channels on the buying journey.