This article was written by Greg Kihlström for Forbes Agency Council. Read the full article here.

With increasing talk about artificial intelligence (AI) in all corners of the business, including marketing, data is on everyone’s mind. Yet customer data has always been important for businesses to prioritize. The move away from third-party cookies and an all-too-heavy reliance on third parties in general has accelerated this. So, too, has AI and the promise of using approaches such as generative AI and predictive analytics to give customers a better experience that is more tailored.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) arose out of a need to give marketers more direct access to the information they need about their customers. With customer relationship management systems a better fit for sales teams (when they were kept up to date), data management platforms (DMPs) mostly serving third-party data needs and a variety of other platforms and sources of information that were difficult to stitch together, a CDP sits in the middle of all of that data infrastructure to enable the right customer data to inform experiences at the time and place with the right message.

Choosing a CDP, however, needs to take into account the full spectrum of needs as well as the existing infrastructure requirements that an organization has. Flexibility is key here, and in this article, I’m going to look at the individual elements of a CDP as well as what you should consider when making an investment decision for your next CDP.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for Forbes Agency Council. Read the full article here.