CDP Report

Analysts on CDPs and Their Quest to Become More Intelligent

Simple data centralization won’t cut it anymore. Drive better business outcomes by looking outside the CDP market for intelligent (AI) solutions.

VP Customer Experience

Time to read3 min read
March 11, 2020

Customer Data Platforms (CDP), an emerging data solution in the martech industry in recent years, must evolve to stay competitive, a recent Forrester Research report finds. Marketers increasingly expect AI capabilities and marketing automation to meet their business objectives, and while CDPs hold promise, it is unclear that they alone provide the solution. 

Normalizing, accessing, and analyzing customer data to support growth has always been a top challenge for B2C marketers. Enter the Customer Data Platform. Traditionally, CDPs promise to ingest data from multiple sources and centralize it into a single customer view, while also making this data available to external systems of insight and engagement. 

 

“Shifting martech features and functionality from one bucket to another won’t help marketers execute their customer engagement strategies. They need more than a new acronym. Instead, to thrive, CDPs must truly progress beyond the status quo.”

– Capabilities CDPs Need To Deliver Value For B2C Marketers, Forrester, 2020 [1]

 

Forrester’s take on CDPs

Forrester analysts Joe Stanhope and Stephanie Liu argue, in the report “The Capabilities CDPs Need To Deliver Value For B2C Marketers”, that in order to compete in an already-crowded industry, CDPs must serve a purpose beyond data centralization and focus on two axis to mature with marketer demands:

  • Offering features that go beyond simple data centralization and span the entire customer journey, which allow marketers to better understand customer behavior across channels. 
  • Driving better business outcomes for marketers and delivering long-term value by creating a solid foundation of AI-driven features, such as real-time segment discovery and automated decisioning and orchestration.

To ensure they can stay competitive in the future, CDPs must evolve and provide the expected core functions (ingesting and storing data, data management, real-time access to profiles and omnichannel orchestration) better than what exists on the market today. And to deliver long-term value, it will take these core functions, as well as automated decision-making and orchestration, among other intelligent features.

 

What You Need to Keep in Mind

With sweeping promises, unclear use cases, and increasing noise from vendors with Marketing Clouds entering the CDP scene, marketers need to have a clear view of their core needs, use cases, and the benefits the solution must deliver before even considering one. And they may look outside the CDP market to meet their objectives as CDPs are failing to deliver clear value and keep up with market demands.

While many martech vendors are scrambling to develop or acquire crucial features to keep up with marketer demands, intelligent solutions that work seamlessly with CDPs (or without them) have emerged to fill this gap. The report mentions solutions such as Tinyclues, which uses its deep learning capabilities across multiple data sets (in a CDP or not) to bring value in strategic omnichannel decision making, customer demand discovery, campaign planning and activation, and short time-to-value execution. 

By using Deep Learning to predict the best topics, audiences, and campaign plans, Tinyclues supports B2C marketers with next-generation insights and clear-cut use cases and benefits: increasing revenue, improving customer experience and driving strategic outcomes. 

 

Download your complimentary copy of this Forrester report to learn more about Customer Data Platforms, including:

 

  • Why CDPs are lacking core capabilities to solve real business problems and deliver long term value;
  • How to evaluate the validity and potential of CDPs to meet your current and future business needs;
  • How players outside the CDP market are paving the way with intelligence and insights, and driving strategic outcomes for marketers.

And contact Tinyclues to learn more about applying its technology to your marketing challenges, with or without a CDP. 

 

 

[1] Capabilities CDPs Need To Deliver Value For B2C Marketers, Joe Stanhope, Stephanie Liu with Mary Pilecki, David Novitzky, Cole Walsh, Christine Turley, Forrester Research, Inc., January 16, 2020

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