Will marketing clouds solve your customer data challenges?

If you thought a marketing cloud would solve your customer data woes, you may want to think again.

“An MC may still require you to stitch together data and connect it to execution systems — even after you thought you had handed off the problem once and for all,” writes argues ActionIQ CEO Tassos Argyros in a new article in MarketingLand.

Here are a few of the reasons.

• Internal silos within the MC. Providers are building out marketing clouds as fast as they can, often through acquisitions. However, that does not mean the provider has integrated all these products and the data they generate.
• A lack of access to historic, first-party data.Your brand no doubt possesses huge amounts of historic customer data that, out-of-the-box, the marketing cloud will not be able to integrate and unify.
• Walled-garden approach. If you want to deploy best-of-breed solutions now or in the future, you may once again find yourself facing data fragmentation.

“Before handing your data woes over to an MC, you should understand the extent to which you will still be on the hook to unify data and integrate the MC to your larger martech stack,” says Argyros.

Specifically, he recommends asking these three key questions:

1. Does the MC currently extend to all my critical customer channels?
2. How much time and work will it take to integrate a new customer data source or marketing execution system not native to the MC?
3. What percentage of my total customer data will marketers be able to leverage when building campaigns? What need technical resources will they need to do so?

Argyros concludes by making a case for an enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP), which can provide “a simple and elegant answer to all three of the questions above,” he says.

Read the full article in MarketingLand.