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The Small Business Marketer's Guide to Customer Data Platforms

Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 6:32 am
by metoc15411
As a small or medium-sized business (SMB), you are used to a limited budget. You can’t afford to spend money on marketing software or technology that doesn’t provide a clear and significant return on investment (ROI).

That's why you might find yourself drawn in when you hear about hot, new innovations in marketing technology, such as customer data platforms (CDPs), a recent software development that promises innovation in marketing automation.

A Guide to Customer Data Platforms for Small Business Marketers
According to the 2017–2018 Gartner CMO Survey ( the full study is available to Gartner clients ), marketing leaders invest two-thirds of their budgets in supporting customer retention and growth.

CDPs claim to help marketing leaders do this.

In this article, we’ll demystify the defining features of tunisia phone number list a CDP and explore whether they’re the next best step in marketing technology for your small to medium business. By the end of this piece, you’ll be able to identify the key features of a CDP, compare them to your current technology/software offerings, and decide whether a CDP is worth investing in.

What is a customer data platform?
Gartner defines a CDP as “a marketing system that integrates a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to model customers and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.”

To meet this definition, a CDP “must have a marketer-friendly web interface” that includes the following features:

Data collection: the ability to obtain your own customer data at an individual level from multiple sources (online and offline) in real time without storage limitations.
Profile unification: the ability to unify profiles at an individual level and link attributes to identifiers.
Segmentation: An interface that allows marketers to create and manage segments.
Activation: Ability to send segments with instructions to fulfillment tools for email campaigns, mobile messages, ads, etc.
In practice, CDPs allow you to automate a step-by-step process that:

Collects customer data.
Combines this data into individual customer profiles.
Divides profiles into segmented markets.
Promotes these segments to technologies that can execute specific marketing campaigns and messages.
The whole process looks something like this:


Key features of a customer data platform presented in one flow chart ( Source - Full content available to Gartner clients)

You may find other forms of software or technology packaged as a customer data platform, but to meet the market definition as we describe it, a CDP must function as described above.