Partner Spotlight: Infoverity and Treasure Data Empower Data-Driven Marketing

Treasure Data and Infoverity previously announced a strategic partnership, combining Treasure Data’s leading customer data platform (CDP) with Infoverity’s enterprise data management and martech solution implementation expertise. Treasure Data and Infoverity have continued to focus their joint offerings on enhancing how businesses gather, govern, and leverage customer data.

Treasure Data spoke with Brandon Moore, Managing Consultant, Infoverity to take a deeper look at this strategic partnership and Infoverity’s experience delivering Treasure Data CDP solutions across various brands.

Treasure Data: Can you tell us about yourself and Infoverity?

Brandon Moore: Infoverity, founded in 2011, is a global enterprise data management consultancy and a Treasure Data systems integrator partner. Infoverity supports Treasure Data customers throughout the entire CDP lifecycle, from strategy and use case generation through incident management and enhancements. Infoverity’s heritage as a globally recognized master data management (MDM) solution leader has continued to expand with investments in the marketing technology, customer experience, and digital experience space.

I spend my time as a client strategy and solution delivery advisor across marketing technology and data management solutions, and I manage the relationship between Infoverity and Treasure Data. Many of our joint customers understand the value of a CDP, but struggle to understand the steps necessary to meeting their business goals. I help my clients define measurable KPIs and goals, build martech program roadmaps, understand tool-for-task and best practices across sprawling technology solutions, and pull forward change management and resourcing conversations early to ensure long-term solution adoption.

Treasure Data: Infoverity is a top-tier partner for Treasure Data. Can you talk about the value of the partnership and how you’re working together?

Brandon Moore: Treasure Data is a strategic partner for Infoverity. We recognize the importance of digital transformation initiatives for broader business transformation, and we also realize the need for data-first services partners that can connect the dots between technology and marketing / CX outcomes. Treasure Data CDP is recognized as a market leader for a reason, as it is fully featured and provides a uniquely flexible and scalable framework. Treasure Data provides coverage of both foundational and advanced use cases, while catering to industry-specific demands across verticals.

Over the last decade we have continued to see digital and marketing initiatives fail due to a misalignment between brands and IT, a lack of understanding of technology capabilities & best practices, and poorly defined business goals and appropriate measurement. Treasure Data CDP sits at the intersection between data and customer engagement, and we believe we are uniquely positioned to help businesses reap the benefits promised by CDPs to drive tangible value.

Treasure Data: What are some of the challenges you are seeing with customers who you’re implementing CDP solutions for, and how do you typically go about addressing those challenges?

Brandon Moore: The most frequent challenge we see with our CDP clients is a lack of first- and zero- party data capture and broader data capture strategy. Many of our clients aim to use a single customer view (SCV) to drive personalization, but they aren’t collecting enough meaningful demographic, firmographic, engagement, loyalty, and other relevant data to drive the outcomes they are looking for. In some cases, our clients have asked us to drive personalization from a list of emails alone. These conversations always lead to more detailed discussions around engagement channel strategy and the value of collecting context specific first- and zero-party data.

The CDP evaluation process can be daunting, and it can be unclear when clients should expect value and tackling of various use cases. Many of our clients beginning their CDP journey struggle to define the problems they are trying to solve and what they are looking to achieve. We spend a lot of time with our clients defining up-front CDP programs and data strategy. We recommend collaborating on defining KPIs and time-bound goals, and socializing the CDP program roadmap across marketing, CX, IT, digital, analytics, and other teams.

Our most successful client engagements are when our clients are open to early collaboration on a CDP program roadmap and we have aligned on a collective definition of success. Our clients also benefit from up front conversations around solution adoption, and the best resourcing structure to effectively manage their marketing technology landscape.

Treasure Data: Are there any common use cases that you’re seeing from customers?

Brandon Moore: Nearly all our CDP clients begin their journey with a focus on the creation of a trustable and accurate unified customer view to drive personalized customer experiences. As the number of digital marketing channels has rapidly expanded, the management of customer audiences and engagement has become siloed across applications and channels, making it difficult to deeply understand customers and drive meaningful personalization. CDPs provide a solution to this problem by creating a single source of truth for all of marketing operations and facilitating true omnichannel engagement and connected customer experiences.

We have seen an increased interest in journey automation and predictive AI / machine learning. We continue to guide our clients to focus on foundational use cases before expanding their CDP to support these more advanced CDP features. As the CDP market has continued to mature, we are excited to share that we have seen an (anecdotal) increase in buy-in from marketing teams and the business really leading the charge on defining the CDP program goals – whereas previously IT would really drive the CDP conversation without immediate business buy-in, oftentimes delaying CDP value recognition.

Treasure Data: What are some of the common misconceptions about customer data platforms in general when you’re in early consulting with clients?

Brandon Moore: Because of how rapidly the CDP space has evolved, there are a lot of misguided opinions on what CDPs are, how they should be used, and what the best operational structure looks like to get the most value out of a CDP.

We regularly encounter the following:

• “The CDP should be owned and ran by my IT organization.” Like other enterprise systems, the most successful CDP solutions require shared ownership across IT and business partners. We have consistently seen CDP implementations fail to deliver value when the CDP becomes a solution in search of a problem. Instead, we recommend prioritizing business impact and alignment with business stakeholders in the CDP procurement process. Operational change management (OCM) should be at the forefront of discussions and should include everything from use case intake and ownership, through finer details on how individuals’ jobs will be impacted by the CDP solution.
• “CDP will help my business personalize customer interactions in a vacuum.” The value of any CDP is going to be directly tied to the quality, volume, and context of relevant enterprise data. A well-executed CDP should become the brains of marketing operations, but the insights and value a CDP can bring to an organization requires the collection of meaningful customer information. In other words, CDPs adhere to the adage, “garbage in, garbage out”. Many of our clients don’t have incredibly wide or clean customer data. This is okay to start, but businesses who lean into first- and zero-party data capture strategies will see an amplification of their CDP results. We also believe that marketing teams that lean into rapid testing and experimentation maximize the value of their CDP investments. CDPs enable cross-channel A/B testing, the driving of deep customer insights to drive personalization (e.g. churn risks, high value customers, predicted lifetime value, etc.), and the improvement of results from conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools. We guide our clients to start small with foundational CDP use cases and more mature clients to shift focus to experimentation and testing, following fail fast methodology.
• “CDPs are the next evolution of operational customer data management.” Although successful CDP implementations require robust data management skillsets, CDPs are purposefully built to service marketing and CX teams, rather than the entire enterprise. We are always concerned when we hear our clients and prospects talk about using their CDP to synchronize golden records across operational (and non-marketing systems) and acting as a Master Data Management (MDM) tool. MDM tools are built to service the data governance and IT organization and provide fine-tuned controls for data stewardship, data standardization and validation, the quarantining / rejecting records that don’t meet defined criteria, fuzzy matching, and upstream syndication to operational systems. We take a more detailed stance on CDP vs MDM, and CDP best practice usage in this blog.

Meet Our Partners

A customer data platform is made even more powerful by the strength of its partnerships.

The Treasure Data CDP Partners Program enables service providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to take full advantage of Treasure Data resources and establish a firm footing in what is fast becoming the foundation of marketing technology.

Learn more about Treasure Data’s partners through our partner spotlight blog series, see them all here.