CDPs from a Marketing Operations POV

Marketing operations is a key foundational component to any organization’s customer experience success.  You’ll quite often hear the word ‘infrastructure’ mentioned by a Marketing operations (aka MOPs) person (like me!) when talking about customer experience (CX) and the customer data that fuels it. What does it mean? It’s like a secret whisper to the mysterious dark side beneath that makes our hearts tick.  After all, the root word for ‘infrastructure’ comes from the root ‘infra’, meaning below.  I believe there is a common thread tied to what generates our peace of mind—understanding how things work.  

It’s no easy feat to develop the cyber highway that data flows through from marketing to the rest of the organization—but a good MOPs person will identify the points for which the data will need to scale. 

This data can have the power to help build operational process for different contexts of the organization. 

How can sales, customer success, and marketing teams alike, potentially leverage the information that we’ve helped to organize?  It’s the Wizard of Oz effect for me.  What’s behind all the magic in this dazzling city?  How does it keep moving and expanding for other integrations? That’s why an important facet to us is data integrity. 

No matter where the data is coming from, part of the job is ensuring that accurate information is in alignment with all the systems.  This is what needs to happen in order for the data to be actionable in the first place.  And this is where building a single view of the customer comes in handy. 

For example – a play by your marketing team for a personalization campaign is initially driven by the story we’ve been able to tell about a person.  Once upon a time there was a pixel, and this pixel became a person we’ve come to know because of information gathered from multiple sources.  Altogether, it’s the single view of the customer.  The story that marketers can help continue to develop through the buyer’s journey.  The story will only be good as the data that has been collected. 

This is why marketing operations teams leverage customer data platforms.  It’s a system that centralizes customer data from multiple sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer services and all customer experience initiatives. 

CDPs help keep these stories organized for output.  Marketers can leverage this single source of truth and build audiences—reaching out with the right message, to the right person, at the right time—because we’re now reflecting their representation in the story that they first made themselves part of. 

People generally like to see themselves represented in the stories they consume.  Why should brand stories be the exception? 

Especially as we’ve reached a point in our human tapestry where we now have the ability to reflect the diversity that the data kaleidoscope has shown us.

Want to see how CDPs have become vital to a marketer’s success? Check out our 2021 State of the CDP Research Report!