4 Choosing your first-party data solution
This chapter covers
- The core technology capabilities for first-party data platforms
- Comparisons of the major marketing technology solutions by category
- Considerations and recommendations based on recent marketing technology offerings
Many of you reading this book may face a confusing set of options and time pressures to find the right first-party data solution for your organization. According to the CDP Institute, a vendor-neutral organization dedicated to helping companies manage customer data, 47% of service providers report that “half or more CDP projects fail”. With odds like that, it’s natural to feel intimidated when parsing through the myriad options. After all, “everyone says they do everything, but they don’t or don’t do it well,” as shared by a marketer recently at a large accounting software firm as they navigated first-party data solutions.
The objective of this chapter is to demystify first-party data solutions to focus on what matters most: how you and your team can leverage your organization’s strengths to prioritize and map capabilities to the right set of use cases. We aim to explain concepts like customer data platform, composable, and activation and leverage the learnings of others to avoid the most common pitfalls.