Marketing Communications Today is a collection of resources for marketing communications
professionals filled with industry research, marketing trends, and career
information about integrated marketing and data-driven communications.
Learn industry insights through the Marketing Communications Today blog,
podcast, as well as Integrate Online.
The tools needed to manage your customer data have changed dramatically since the
days of “database marketing” in the 1980s. The latest iteration is a CDP, or customer
data platform, the subject of our stimulating discussion with David Raab, a leading
expert and founder of the CDP Institute. He explains how the tech landscape has
become quite complex and continues to morph. The number of systems continues to
grow, fed by a proliferation of channels, declining development costs, and easily
available funding. Listen in to understand the customer data landscape, why it’s
critical to marketing success, and where the technology is going in the future.
Ruth Stevens: What is a customer data platform, and why do I, as a marketer,
need one?
David Raab: The official CDP institute definition is that a customer data platform
is packaged software that builds a unified persistent customer database that's
accessible to other systems. You can buy this thing off the shelf, which means
it's faster and cheaper and more likely to work. Unified persistent customer database
brings together data from all sources. It stores that data someplace so that you
don't lose it if it gets dropped from a source system somewhere. It's a customer
database so it's organized around the customer and not around products or about
web pages or around retail stores. It’s organized to make it easy to pull together
all the data about a single customer. It is designed to share that data so that
every system in the company that you need unified customer data has one place to
look which saves some effort because everybody is working off the same data so
it's consistent. Most companies today have customer data that's stored in a bunch
of different systems. When people ask how do I know if I need a CDP, you need a
CDP if you find yourself saying you know there's this data in this system that
I really need in that system but I can't get to it. There are retail purchases
from my point of sale system and my physical store that I'd really like to share
with my website so that I can do retargeting on the website based on what people
did in the retail store. Or there's a customer history that's captured on the website
that I'd really like to share with my call center agents so they can see what people
have been doing on the web when they're talking to them. Anything that involves
that kind of data sharing, if it's not something you can already do, that's a gap
and that's the gap that the CDP is going to fill.
Each semester the
WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group
of individuals into the
MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently
varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their
undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the worlds
most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective
to the program.
Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications
Network in the fall semester:
Each semester the
WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group
of individuals into the
MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently
varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their
undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the world’s
most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective
to the program.
Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications
Network in the fall semester:
Each semester the
WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group
of individuals into the
MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently
varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their
undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the world’s
most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective
to the program.
Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications
Network in the fall semester:
The role of the PR professional is changing fast. No longer limited to media relations
or crisis management, these days PR people have evolved into larger and more strategic
roles as “communicators,” who handle multi-channel messaging to a variety of important
audiences, or “publics.” Our guest, Bonnie Harris, explains what’s driving this
change, and where it’s likely to go next.
Ruth Stevens: What is a communications professional and how is that different
from marketer or a marketing communications professional?
Bonnie Harris: Communications is a subset of marketing, but I also think that
public relations in that title over the years has become really synonymous with
media relations and getting news stories. We've seen a trend in the last two or
three years where people really are calling it communications once again, which
is a smart thing to do because it goes back to the basics of what that job entails
from the very beginning.
