WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

In our in-depth playbook, we cover everything you need to know about:
The benefits of a Customer Data Platform;
Getting started with tried-and-true use cases;
Building a team with the right skillsets for any size organization;
Securing buy-in from executives across the company;
Measuring the ROI of CDPs to prove value to different stakeholders

Use the 2019 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising to prioritize your marketing technology investments.

The number of marketing technologies available to businesses has soared in the last five years – from about 150 in 2011 to over 3,800 in 2016, according to ChiefMarTech.com. And a study by eConsultancy and Tealium found that businesses use on average more than 20 marketing technology vendors to deliver their campaigns and customer experiences. This rapid expansion of the MarTech space has created significant challenges for marketing, technology, and management teams alike making it difficult to build cohesive, end-to-end customer experiences because of gaps between marketing technologies, the data they leverage, and how they are implemented. This paper provides an overview of the four core problems businesses are facing with data due to the proliferation of marketing technology, and how adopting a Universal Data Hub (UDH) solves these problems. 

The technology to unlock the value of personalization at scale is readily available, and you may be surprised how much of it you already have in place. You don’t need to tackle everything at once. Develop a road map with regular stage gates to evaluate platform progress based on the trade-off between value at stake and ease of implementation. Identify and prioritize quick wins that make it easy for the organization to continue funding the transformation.

Personalization is a crucial weapon in the marketer’s arsenal to achieve that goal. That’s how businesses can deliver tailored recommendations, content, offers, and experiences, across all channels and devices, along the entire customer journey. Personalization at scale has the potential to create $1.7 trillion to $3 trillion in new value (Exhibit 1). Capturing this value will require mastering the technologies and addressing the organizational disconnects—all while forging trust with customers and protecting their data.