CDP Institute

We’ve now looked at things from IT and marketer perspectives, so let’s finish with the customer herself.

We’re all familiar with Gartner’s 2011 prediction http://ism7505.business.wayne.edu/Week1/doc/january_3_cmoasbuyingcenter_lmclellan.pdf that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is one reason that marketers can buy technology for themselves.

A survey by Salesforce.com also placed cloud migration at the top of IT managers’ priority list, while SaaS ranked seventh. The managers’ biggest pain points were internal: budget (43%), security (40%), and keeping skills up to date (33%). Organizational alignment ranked sixth (26%) and connected customer experience placed tenth (24%). The group has its hands full: 37% were integrating more than 25 systems and 73% were integrating more than ten. Bear that in mind next time you ask IT for help.

Let’s talk today about analytics. We’ll start with an announcement from digital solution provider Anexinet, which has expanded its ListenLogic social media analytics solution to include unstructured data from call center recordings, email, chat, text, CRM, and other channels. The system looks for patterns that can be used to guide customer interactions and predict future behavior.

Behavior patterns are interesting but what marketers most want to understand is what drives revenue. Social analytics firm Engagement Labs is making the connection by adding syndicated sales data to its propriety database of online and offline conversation metrics. Resulting reports will show correlations between conversations and sales, although it apparently won’t include other factors that could also influence results. Engagement Labs’ has what it says is “the world’s only offline word of mouth tracking system for brands”.

Looking for something more rigorous than patterns or correlations? How about  multivariate testing using artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms to optimize conversion rates? In this stellar blog post, Neal Cole of digital agency Conversion Uplift explains the workings of Sentient Ascend’s testing system.  Worth knowing.

Advertisers continue to push Google to block placements on offensive sites.

Here's some new data on the tug-of-war between marketing departments and corporate IT.

Back to Customer Data Platforms. Here’s a McKinsey article that delightfully calls data activation and personalization “the heartbeat of modern marketing” and then positions CDPs as “solving the ongoing challenge of true personalization”. They describe CDPs as including analytics and decisioning, which is broader than the CDP Institute’s definition. But it’s still a great endorsement. Related: the Customer Experience Matrix blog just published a graphic showing how CDPs relate to other marketing systems.

Here’s a crowd-pleaser: an interactive logoscape of the big data industry just released by Knowledgent, a data and analytics consultancy. With 250+ vendors, it just scratches the surface, although there were plenty of companies I’ve never heard of. By interactive, I mean you can click on logos to see company profiles and even do comparisons and searches. Hours of fun!

Less entertaining but probably more useful, the CDP Institute has just published answers to Frequently Asked Questions about CDPs. If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between CDPs and DMPs, how much staff you need to run a CDP, or what a CDP costs, here are simple answers. Since some of those are not simple questions, be prepared for the occasional “it depends”.