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How to select Data cloud for your marketing needs?
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) article ‘Why a Data cloud should be your next investment (dated March 20, 2020)’ mentions that Data cloud are just what marketers need to obtain unified and precise data.
Data cloud enables access, analysis, and action on each detail that a company knows about a customer, which allows the marketing of this data through more personalized, nuanced, and effective content.
As we mentioned in our previous article, ‘Are you leading Data and Analytics in your Organization? Make sure you know this about Customer Data Platforms!,’ the D&A leaders must examine whether the Data cloud solution fits their overall D&A strategy and operating framework.
Hence, correctly identifying a Data cloud vendor who can satisfy your organization’s marketing D&A technology needs becomes essential and relevant.
The following steps may be considered in the process of identification of a Data cloud vendor:
- Review the primary Data cloud capabilities: Data collection, Profile unification, Segmentation, and Activation.
- Identify your use cases for a Data cloud based on the above review.
- Exhaustively list the vendors that can support key workflows for the relevant use cases; e.g., creating the customer segment likely to churn some personalized recommendations provided across the channels.
- Prioritize the list based on the key marketing priorities of your Organization.
- Have a thorough data stakeholders’ consultation with your IT, marketing, and D&A teams.
- Align the company’s customer data strategy with the marketing technology strategy.
- Evaluate the options of adopting a solution from a possible vendor or in-house development of a platform. Support the possible approach by capturing the organizational needs for prebuilt integrations, marketing orchestration, connection to Customer Experience (CX) channels, and native execution.
- Based on the above evaluation, develop a strong justification for deploying a Data cloud.
- Invoke the customer data stakeholder consultation once again; and set realistic expectations for collecting and unifying the customer data across the different channels and touchpoints.
- Understand, and help everyone acknowledge personalization use cases that the gap left by cookie deprecation will close by infusing third-party data and identity resolution into the Data cloud.
- Prepare an inventory of existing skills and workflows in your marketing team.
- Evaluate the marketing team’s ability to collaborate with the other data stakeholders, particularly for data science, customer data modeling, data privacy, and execution.
- Select the marketing solutions that deliver business value.
- Let your team create the experiences that your customers want!
