To unlock the real ROI of a CDP takes focus in 6 key areas. As a Marketer you expect a CDP to help you consolidate your customer data, provide a place where you can create audiences and support activation of those audiences through various channels to drive revenue growth.

At Transparent Partners, we’ve had extensive experience assessing and implementing CDPs for many of our clients across several industries. One key point to remember is that a CDP is only a single piece in a much larger puzzle. To extract the full value of a CDP you will likely also need to instrument other components of technology, apply new and updated processes, and evolve your marketing strategies.

Through our years of experience, we identified six areas of focus vital to ensuring implementation success and value creation:

Stakeholder alignment. A CDP program crosses many business units and multiple technology systems. In order to successfully implement your CDP, you need to gain alignment with stakeholders across areas such as Technology, Product, Marketing, Analytics, and Data Management.

Data, Data, Data. The fuel of any CDP is the data it ingests from other platforms or systems. Having a clear data strategy is the first step and the second step is having a mechanism to monitor the quality of that data and resolve any issues as they arise.

Use Cases and Business Objectives You need clear Use Cases and Business Objectives that you are driving towards. In addition, you need to document a measurement plan to track the key business outcomes that you are trying to achieve.

Organizational structure and staffing model. Program management, not just project management, is required to ensure the successful orchestration of projects. A staffing plan is also required for the new roles that are required to manage and operate the CDP.

Change Management. The CDP has the potential to change the way you work and how you market to your customers. This change needs to be planned for, executed, and optimized. Change management is key.

Not a Project. The implementation of a CDP is not a singular project, it’s a journey. There will always be a need to address new use cases and include more data in the platform.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you extract maximum value from your CDP investment and avoid some of the pitfalls along the way, please reach out to drankine@transparent.partners.