Unsurprisingly the TikTok trend of “Get Ready With Me” has surged over the past six years. The digital generations of today are transfixed on tips and tricks videos that are scattered across social media platforms in the bid to discover the secrets of how to be successful.

For me, I love a ‘tips and tricks’ article or video as much as anyone, and so thought I would create my very own “Get Ready With Me” style blog. No no, you will not be watching me get ready for a night out, nor will you be discovering the secrets of my beauty regime.

However, you will be discovering how your business can be as ready as it needs to be when it comes to unlocking the potential of customer data. So put that moisturizer down, and read on.

Why customer data?

The holy grail for many marketers is to intrinsically understand consumers and audiences to better serve them experiences that matter. While the allure of the “single customer view” is stronger than ever, it is important to make sure your business is set up correctly in order to reap the benefits and drive value. And, the technology that unlocks these benefits is something called a CDP (Customer Data Platform).

Let me share a snap-shot of what CDPs can offer your business, in its simplest form:

• The collection and unification of all first-party data. The purpose of a customer data platform is to connect all the data that marketers use to understand and engage their customers with. The CDP does this by acting as a single source of truth for first-party customer data, with all a brand’s data on an individual customer. This means relevant experiences and scaling customer journeys.
• Managing customer data through a privacy-first lens. CDPs manage first-party data and consumer privacy and data rights by controlling the data flows between different marketing systems and managing consent. They can handle consent at group, brand and market level, and then all interaction with the customer will honor the customer’s wishes.
• Customer data activation CDPs can create audience segments that can be used across the rest of your marketing platforms and channels. This means improving messaging relevancy and recognizing effective opportunities to give value to your customers.

Silverbullet’s bread and butter has always been supporting businesses to realize the benefits of their data and tech, and so I thought it might be useful to pull together some best practices surrounding CDP readiness.

It’s time to “Get Ready With Me”, and explore the below four steps to be ‘CDP Ready’:

• Analyze Where You Are Currently. Fragmented data often resides in silos across various business departments, including marketing, sales, customer support, etc. Before you even begin to think of implementing technology, it is important to take an honest look at the internal structures and processes to identify where the gaps may be, and where improvements need to be made. Ask yourself and your team questions such as: What systems are currently in place centered around customer data? Do you know what customer data it includes? Is third-party anonymous data mixed in? How many applications are in your martech stack? And how does data get from one application to another? Having a good idea of what is and isn’t working before you transform your business, is a fantastic starting point.
• Have A Clear Strategy In Mind. In close alignment with step one, you need to ensure you have a clear overarching objective, strategy & potential tactics in mind before you begin your journey. This includes ensuring you know what it is you want to achieve by outlining your outcome(s). Understand what about your engagement with customers you want to change and challenge how a CDP supports you in doing that. A CDP can be an extremely important piece in the puzzle in driving strategic conversations that bring together fragmented teams to deliver business objectives. A CDP is not just a marketing system; it can help the overall running of a business including the product, design, innovation, and customer support which all helps to improve the customer journey. Set your strategy with some KPIs so you can measure and adapt as you go.
• Get your Data Ready. CDPs take the heavy lifting off your hands to turn raw customer data sets into a cohesive customer picture. Increasingly, businesses are managing larger volumes of data, and so the humble CDP helps to improve the quality of your data to build valuable customer profiles. Identifying all the data sources you want to connect to your CDP is paramount. From there, a CDP should be able to take over the process of importing and keeping that data, so you have easy access to real-time information. CDPs, like any platform, will only work effectively with good input. Filling it with messy datasets will limit its impact and data should be clean and standardized first.
• Secure buy-in from the whole organization. CDPs are focused on breaking down the silos, to allow more people across an organization to access valuable information to drive results. Essentially, it is about making the data easier to use, which requires full transparency and buy-in across the organization. My good pal and colleague Alex wrote about the importance of creating a strong buy-in and culture in his DataTalks blog HERE. A big part of embedding a CDP into your business is about teamwork and culture. You need a task force behind you and your tech in order to extract its utmost potential.

Summary.

CDPs – on the whole – are designed for speed to value, ensuring businesses can “plug and play” in multiple systems to build a single customer profile that puts data at your fingertips, for years to come. However, driving a successful CDP adoption is not just about the technology itself, but also about embracing change, and implementing a brand new culture throughout your business. Teamwork makes the dream work, right?

Silverbullet has been supporting businesses transform their data and tech culture since our very beginning. We live and breathe data. So let us help you do the same.

Oh, and if you need some beauty tips, do not hit me up. I’d be totally useless.