So What? Marketing Technology AMA

Well, happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I'm Katie, joined by John on the other side. Get that right. And I am at the helm of all of the buttons.

And so I apologize in advance. So uh this week, John, you and I are doing a marketing technology AMA. So basically an ask me anything. Uh we have some questions from our Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. Um, and if you're interested in joining that, you can do so at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

And uh towards the end of the show, we'll actually also have a QR code. Uh if that's easier for you. We're testing that out. Uh, you know, just doing all the fun stuff this week. So, John, where would you like to start with our AMA?

Yeah, you know, it's there's been a lot of things going on in the marketing automation front that it's been really interesting to follow. It kind of used to be that there was a short list of vendors that you would go with and figure out where you want to go, but there's the the space is now mature. There are so many different vendors, and actually, one of the biggest trends that I've noticed in the past year is white labeling. You know, we now have a couple of platforms that um people can use and they buy them solely for the support that they get. You know, it's the same kind of thing, but you're buying a team that actually makes it work for you.

So services have become a big part, even above features. But yeah, I don't know. There's a bunch of questions that came in from the forum. I don't know which one do you want to throw first? If you want to just jump into that, we can start there.

Well, so maybe we start with um let's see. So one of the questions we got this from our community member uh Laura Barlow, and she was like, What are some of your favorite platforms for small businesses? And I feel like this is a great question, especially us also being a small business. Uh so she's asking about social media marketing platform for reporting, uh, email marketing newsletters, SEO, and she listed off a bunch that they've tried. Um, so John, you I mean, you're you're you're a hardcore techie more so than I am, and you like to test all the stuff.

So do you have any favorite platforms um for small business that you like using? Yeah, and of course we do have to put in a disclaimer as we start up too, because it's like we get, you know, we have some of these companies as clients for trust insights and for marketing over coffee. And then Chris does work with a bunch of different clients. So before we um dive into deep naming names, we do have to say that we get paid by a lot of people and so take you know our advice with a grain of salt. But we do have a track record of not working with jerks.

So I think that's really important to keep in mind. Um, but yeah, I, you know, I mean, part of it is love and the home team too, but HubSpot is a good place to start if you don't really know what the heck you're doing, and you're a really small company because they do have a free version for small businesses, and there's a bunch of different platforms you you can run on as far as hosting your website and having a CRM and a marketing automation, you know, tool without doing any real heavy lifting to set up and that one I'd have to tag as my favorite. So that's kind of the the easy place to begin. Um yeah, when you get over into social media now, that's a separate one. That's you know, there's nothing in HubSpot that does that kind of stuff, so you have to look for a different vendor on that front.

And actually, you cover this stuff more than me as far as work with Brooke and things like that. I know that TalkWalker has always been a partner of ours, and we've always been impressed with what they're doing. Um, but Brooke is a big fan of Sprout, and I know that um Chris has had a lot of good things to say about Sprout having a lot of data that other platforms don't have, which even Laura had mentioned that she thought the Sprout data was better than um some of the other platforms she's been using. Uh Hootsuite does sneak into there because it's the price is right, and you know, I've used that for a lot of stuff. Um, but yeah, I don't know anything else on the social side that you're watching.

Are you guys looking at any other vendors, or is there anything that you've seen that's good or bad? The other one that I would mention is Agora Pulse for scheduling and just sort of keeping track of your different channels. Um, I mean, it really I would say it comes down to what social media platforms you're on because every one of those vendors is going to have limitations in terms of who they integrate with. So I know I think Sprout is going to be rolling out an integration with LinkedIn. Um, I don't know if the timing on that.

Um, you know, LinkedIn is notoriously stingy with their analytics. So I would say if you are heavy on LinkedIn, definitely find the system that you know has the best reporting on LinkedIn. It really comes down to which social platforms you care about. You know, systems like Snapchat and TikTok, they're still not really in the sphere of, you know, these um social scheduling platforms or social listening platforms. Um because they're still very closed off in terms of the analytics they provide.

So that's a consideration as well. But I would definitely take a look at the roadmap. A lot of these products give you the roadmap of what's coming. And so if there's a social platform they don't currently integrate with, but they've said that they're going to within the next six months or 12 months, that might be a good option for you. And then you know ultimately it comes down to how big of a place social media is in your marketing mix.

You know, and that will probably dictate how much money you're willing to spend on a social scheduling platform. Yeah, no, that that's a great point because there's some companies that are just you know they're not going to bother bother with social at all. But I think you definitely don't have some kind of listening setup, even if it's just tweet deck for free and you've got your company name in there. So you you can at least kind of uh at least hear the train before it runs over you like that might be a good idea. Another plug to that I have to give is G2 crowd as far as if you're looking for tools that's probably as far as I know the best place to go to just type in the type of software you're looking for and have it come up with five or six um different options.

Yeah I think the nice thing about GT crowd is that they do break it down by feature. Yeah you can see um maps as far as like it yeah and that's to step back to one thing to always do when you're doing this stuff is always write down the top three or five features that you are the must-haves are the most important things and use that to filter because that will easily exclude a lot of vendors when you suddenly find out that, like, oh wait, it doesn't work with Zap Beer or something like that. You know, that can easily cross stuff off your list. Um, I would say the other place that you can find uh really good resources is the um is Scott Breakner's chief Martech.com, the Mar Tech Stack. Um in what where are we?

2022, uh, they researched 9,932 different solutions. Um and you can get into their breakdown of all of the different uh systems as well. So you can, you know, there's really good ways to have people who've already done the work for you in terms of the research. So I think G2 is a really great option. Um Chief Martech is a really great option.

You know, let other people do the research for you. And you know, they've they have a whole team of people who are paid to figure out what all the features are and whether or not you need them based on your business requirements. Yeah, and they've got the Martech virtual event is end of September too. So if you're shopping, there's no better way to kind of get in front of a bunch of vendors. And the big thing is because this stuff is just always changing, you know, the roadmaps are changing, the pricing is changing, there's acquisitions, like everything is a mess.

So this is one area where events can really be productive for you. You know, if you can, I mean, obviously, virtual events are a bit more of a challenge, but if you can go to a live event and wander around and actually talk to vendors and talk to live users, um, you can get a lot of great insight quickly. Um, so in terms of Lara's question about favorite platforms, you know, so we talked about HubSpot is a really great option for a small business. Um, you know, in terms if you just if you just have a simple website and want to get an email newsletter out there, I know Substack is a really great option for a lot of people who are just self-publishing, um, you know, smaller like solopreneurs and small businesses, it's a really straightforward uh email newsletter piece of software. Um, so that may be a great place to start.

And as your newsletter grows, you can look for something a little bit more uh hardcore in terms of the technical features. Yeah, for email newsletters, there's a lot of stuff going on. Substack you mentioned is great. And that kind of goes down that path of people being able to do paid subscriptions. You know, you have this whole vertical of people that just write cool email newsletters and make thousands of dollars a month.

Um, and you have to watch two things to watch with that. One is how the model works for pricing for users, because then a lot of those are tiered. So it's like as you jump from 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, you might find your bill doubling. Um, and some of these vendors have been taking a hit for, you know, you're kind of locked in and then suddenly you find out the price is gonna double, you know, next year for whatever. Um, and then the other thing with that is um, you know, how does it work as far as getting the content in there?

You know, some of these platforms now have a real kind of a great what you see, what you get platform and allow you to host the website uh as a website. And that's another thing to look at with the setup. You know, you want to make sure that you've got your own domain ultimately for that. You don't want to have somebody else's, you know, have the platform own the domain. So over the long term you have no control.

In fact, I I've been using Ghost for the marketing over coffee newsletter and got that running. And that was actually one of the requirements. They were like, look, if you're gonna be doing bulk mailing over 5,000, you've got to set up your own domain because they don't want to take the hit for the domain. Um, but and I can uh Ghost has been pretty good so far. I've been pretty impressed with how that works.

Um, but it is no substitute also for the you know, MailChamp constant contact, those type of vendors where you do A-B testing and you have all kinds of lists management, and uh there's just a bunch of stuff going on in that space, and that's kind of a whole separate deal. If that's part of your workflow, you need to take the time and dig in there and figure out which vendor is going to do the right stuff for you. Well, and again, that goes back to you know, what are your business requirements? And so if email newsletters are going to be central to your strategy marketing strategy, then you definitely want to make sure that you're getting all of the right pieces out of it for sure. Um, you know, we use Modic.

Uh, and by we, I mean Chris uses Modic because it's more on the technical side. You set up your own server, you know, it's all in, you know, code and things and whatnot that I personally don't understand. But for him, it's a really great option because he has the most control over what's getting sent out, and we do get decent metrics out of it. So for us from right now, um, it's a good system. It doesn't have some of the features that I would like to have in uh a marketing automation system, but it also hasn't been a big enough priority for us to go ahead and switch from Modic to something else.

Um, you know, there's definitely drip campaigns and those kinds of things that we've set up through HubSpot, which we also use as a CRM, but the two systems don't talk to each other, and that's one of my, you know, long-term, I would like the two systems or one system that does both things to talk to each other a little bit more cleanly. Yeah, and you know, a big part that we have to be clear on that is that you know, Chris plays around with that because he works in that space, you know, he's always working with automation, he wants to know these tools. For most organizations. You don't want to build a core competency of hosting and building your marketing automation solution. Unless, you know, if you're an e-commerce company and kind of knowing what's going on in that space is part of your mission, then that you can make a case for that.

But for most businesses, it should be, you know, let's spend 95% of our time writing copy and testing and working on offers and working on the product. Like you don't want to be taking three days out to upgrade your marketing automation server. Like that's just you, you know, that's sunk cuss that um and to be honest, it's you know, that's the kind of stuff you want to have a vendor for, right? I mean, you want to have somebody who's already done five upgrades this week walk in and do your upgrade and get it done in 20 minutes, as opposed to your IT person having to sit through a day of training to figure out to do this update that they're only going to do once. Um, so that that kind of gets factored into the mixes like is this stuff you really want to focus on as part of your core business.

Well, and we have a comment uh from one of our friends, John Blue, who says MailChimp uh still in use here, mainly doing mainly due to it being on since 2009, 2010. The point being is that there are there are software providers out there that are still really good. It just really comes down to what do you need for your business to be successful. MailChimp is a great option, constant contact's a great option, you know, HubSpot's a great option. It really just depends on what it is that you need.

Yeah, and no, John, I would love to hear more if you want to comment further on that because that that was one thing that I had in my notes to comment on was for so long, MailChimp had the trophy as kind of the simplest and easiest to go to. And it's been really interesting in the past three or four years, people actually jumping over to constant contact. Um, and I know part of that is you know, over in MailChimp managing segmented lists is not a simple concept. Like you actually have to spend some effort to make sure that your lists are optimized. Because the big thing with Chimp, the ultimate idea is that you want to have a single list and then you have segments set up, individual users go into certain segments.

Uh because with prior to that, other email vendors, the idea was you just kept uploading lists, you know, and you would get charged by the send. So you didn't really care how many names you had up there. But with MailChimp, it does make sense to have a single unified list that's segmented so that that's the minimum number of subscribers, so you actually pay the least. And I know a lot of people have said that's just that gets to be too much, you know, to handle. And it's been funny because constant contact was kind of forgotten as like the oh, that's last generation stuff and it's gone.

And then of course, there's um acquisitions. So you've got MailChimp now is actually an intuit product, right? That's actually and so it wouldn't surprise me if we start to see payment or finance stuff like eventually come into that. And then constant contact, I know has gone public, and I don't know where that stands if it's gone private again or whatever, but there's a lot going on there. Um, but and then and this was great because it touches on yet another point of switching and costs, right?

It's definitely come to the point now where it's really hard to make a case to change vendors because the switching costs are going to be way greater than any you know, single one feature that you're gonna get if you switch to the other one, and and that's even presuming that the switch goes flawlessly, like God forbid you mail your blacklist during the rollover or you know, do some kind of horrible thing that you know could really cause even more trouble than it was worth. So yeah, I if you're happy with the chimp now, you know, my gut would be that unless there's some system that you need to integrate to or some other thing that you know is earth shattering, there's no point in spending time looking anywhere else. I would agree with that. Because I mean, just to your point, it's a switching cost. Um, all right.

So that's actually sort of a good segue into uh our next question on our AMA, which is how many platforms is too many platforms? And so, as we mentioned, in the 2022 Martech 9000, there are 9,932 marketing technology platforms broken down into different, you know, categories. How many platforms is too many platforms for you to have? Um I think that we can all, you know, ourselves included at Trust Insights, we can easily get, you know, shiny object syndrome, like, oh, well, the current one that I have doesn't do this, but this one over here does this. So let me just add this on top of that.

Oh, this one over here does this. Let me just add that on top of that. And you keep stacking them until you have this, you know, gargantuan pile of marketing technology products, and you don't know where your data lives. And so I guess the question that I'm getting back around to you, John is how much is too much, and how do you know? Yeah, how much do you do you know when you have too much?

Well, the good news is you're only adding to the stack for two reasons, right? One is because it's giving you some functionality that you never had before, something brand new, a new channel or a new uh way to collect or analyze data, and the other one is because it gives you some kind of um productivity boost, like you're able to do something faster, easier, cheaper, or whatever. And those are the only two reasons that you normally take stuff on. And yeah, it is insane. We see, like from some of the stuff we did with Marketing Over Coffee and with Stack and Flow back when we were doing that podcast, of it's not unheard of to have a you know 20 person organization have over 100 or 150 SaaS-based solutions at work in their workflow.

And really, there's only the easy way you find out if you've got a problem is when you have churn and you lose institutional knowledge, right? Your accounting department will come back and say, hey, we're cutting a monthly bill for this, and we don't even know what this is, and nobody in your department knows what it is either. And that's when you know you've, you know, you've gone too far. You've got stuff that is not being used. That's really the big thing.

And then there is a subset of that too of you've got too much when you have platforms where you're not using the full feature set. You know, you've bought something, and you know, classic example is people buy an email marketing solution and they get, you know, as they're going through the purchase process, they're way into sequences or A-B testing or whatever. And then you go back a year later and they haven't built any sequences or they're not using any sequences, you know, and that's stuff that's underutilized. So those are kind of the two big things. If you're if your spend is out of control, and then if you've got features that are not getting used, but if you have, you know, good um governance at the front end, you know, you shouldn't really be having too much problem with this.

But that's of course asking a lot. There's governance at the start. So it uh and I think it it does make sense to do a quarterly or at least annually review of here are the tools in the stack, just so you can figure out what you're paying for. And you should go back at that point and look at the prices that you're paying, because odds are you could be paying too much for users as time goes by, they adjust models to um, you know, lure in new customers. And so you might be able to save considerably by renegotiating your existing contracts because you can be sure that you know nobody is gonna reach out to you and say, oh, hey, you know, by the way, this is you know half price per seat.

Now you're paying way too much. Like that doesn't happen. Yeah. I want to go back to the governance piece of it. And that's really the key to making sure you don't have uh too much in your Martech stack.

Um, you know, I think the quarterly reviews is really important because it really does come down to are you even using the thing? Um are you making decisions with the data, or is it just sort of a, oh, I'm just curious about how many followers I have on Twitter? Like, is is that going to make or break your business if you no longer have Hootsuite, for example, you know, it's picking on Hootsuite for a second. You know, are you actually doing anything with your social media data? And is that something that, you know, if you stopped using it, your business would stop functioning, you wouldn't be able to make decisions.

And so I know the past couple of years, a lot of marketing teams have had to make those kinds of budget decisions, and it's been difficult because they have found that they have a very bloated Martech stack. Uh, we have a client who uses a couple of different website um metrics reporting tools, and they're paying for both systems, they're trying to use both systems. The two systems are never going to match because they're two different systems, and they just can't bring themselves to make a decision because some people like this, some people like this, and nobody is willing to make that decision. So they continue to pay for both systems, and it's just it's silly. You don't need two systems that you're paying for that do the exact same thing.

Um, so that's definitely when too much, you have too many things, especially when you only have a small, a small you know, segment of people on your team who even know how to use one of the systems or how to log into a system. Yeah, no, it is funny how systems tend to uh attach to bureaucracy, you know. It just gets locked to it, and that's the way it goes. Um, John Blue threw out there, he so he just said I didn't know this. He said he's using MailChimp percent credits, so that that is an option now.

So that's uh good to hear. I did not know about that. Um he had also mentioned about is asking about the Martex stack is ongoing maintenance. Um, WordPress marketing tech plugins come to mind, he says that is a big deal. Um, I can say that we use like WP Engine doing manage WordPress has taken a lot of headaches out of the mix for us.

It's not cheap, but the idea of having daily site backups and then having um plug-in updates run automatically, that's kind of a nice one-two punch because then you can just say, okay, a new plugin was updated, you it will just run an update. And if it does host something or crash something, you can just go in and roll back to yesterday and figure out what the problem is. But so now we only need to get involved with plugins when they cause a mess. The other, you know, 80 or 90% of them were able to just let push through. Um, so as we're talking about how many platforms are too many platforms, that leads us nicely into the next question of um how do you identify customer pain points?

And so if you think about the previous question of if you have too many systems that have too many pieces of disconnected data, you're probably not able to figure out what your customer pain points are. So that's a really good case for why you want to pair back how many different systems you're collecting data in, especially about your customers. But you know, to the question of how do you identify customer pain points? I mean, I can think of a variety of ways, but John, I'll turn it over to you first. Let me take the first shot.

No, that's it's a fantastic question. I was looking at the list. That was the best question of the bunch because it's so difficult to stay on top of that. I mean, one easy answer is mystery shoppers, right? You can have people that behave like customers and use the systems and you can get feedback for them as far as, you know, actually my stuff got broken here, or why are you sending me this email when I bought the thing yesterday?

And so you can see all of that. But in our space where, you know, we're doing more consulting and we're dealing with early adopters and it's small classic B2B numbers, it yeah, you a lot of times you just never hear about the pain. You know, it's just easier for customers or prospects to go away than to take any time to tell you about why they didn't want to do business with you or why they stopped doing business with you. So yeah, I don't know. I'm I'm interested if you got any other interesting takes on that because this is it's one of the biggest problems, especially for a small business to not fall into the trap of and have money just leaking out that they don't know about.

You know, if I was actually talking about this with someone yesterday as we were talking about the trust insights business, and they were asking me, like, well, what are the pain points that your customers typically experience? And there's definitely a disconnect between what we think their pain points are and what the customers feel like their pain points are. And I would say 99% of the time, the customer doesn't really even know what the exact pain point is. And so trying to find the solution is really difficult for them. Um, and so if we say to someone, well, what are the pain points?

They're just gonna look at us like a deer cotton headlights and go, I don't know, shit's broken. Like, fix it. But that's not really what the problem is. And so it might be that they have the wrong team members or the wrong skill sets. It might be that there's no process, it might be that they're using 8,000 different Martech platforms and none of them are the right thing for their business requirements.

And so as we're talking with you know customers about what the word pain points, it comes down to really digging in and you know, asking them, well, you know, what decisions. So rather than saying what are your pain points, it's asking them like what decisions can you make with your data? What is your, you know, how long does it take you to run all of these reports that you have to run? So if they say, well, out of 30 hours it takes 25, well, it may be an automation problem. If they say they can't make decisions with their data, then it's probably a data integrity data collection problem.

But quite honestly, where we trust insights find out about a lot of what's going on with the B2B marketing space is um through our analytics for marketers free Slack group. Um, because what ends up happening is we've built this community without the agenda of selling anything to them. That's not our intention. They don't people don't show up and automatically get a hard sell. What we're able to do is just listen.

We can see people having conversations with each other because it's an open community, and the kinds of questions that community members are asking are an indication to us as the pain points that potential customers are having. So there was a question yesterday about how to use BigQuery, because now with Google Analytics 4, it's one of the systems that comes along for the ride with Google Analytics for Tag Manager, Search Console, and Data Studio, you also have BigQuery in the mix, whereas in universal analytics, that wasn't necessarily the case. You could use it. And so now we're seeing that one of the pain points for marketers is what the heck do I do with BigQuery? What data can I put into it?

What data can I get out of it? And that then becomes for us a potential solution that we can offer. So we can chime in on that conversation, but then we can then turn around in our content marketing and say, and here's what you do with BigQuery, and here's how you use it. We can create courses around that. And so that I feel like is for us, anyway, the best way for us to figure out when someone can't articulate what the pain points are, turn to the community and figure out what questions are people asking, because that tends to be the most common pain point.

Yeah, that is a great point. And that when people are actually questioning or have customer service concerns or whatever, like that is your moment of truth there. Like that's your chance to actually figure out what's going on. Um here's a question that is being asked a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Um, what do you see as the impact of the cookie less future on business?

Yeah, that's you know, a huge question. It's funny, I just saw Google push back yet again another couple months on that. The big glaring one to me is all kinds of retargeting. You know, there's all of these retargeting tools where you've got, you know, second party ad networks sharing data that only show your ads to people that have been qualified through some other, you know, data that's just out there in the world, and that's all getting shut off and closed down. So I see that as the biggest part of it.

Um yeah, I don't know if I see a lot of pain on top of that. It's more just that it does get companies thinking more about first debt, you know, first party data. And do they want to build a customer data platform and you know, just gathering the data yourself because basically the source of free info is going to dry up. So I I don't know. Yeah, the only thing I've seen is I I know that there are people doing things like retargeting, and they're like, okay, yeah, we need to backfill because we're gonna lose this.

But as far as the general, you know, small businesses, unless there's something you know you're using that kind of data for, I don't think this is really gonna affect you that much. It's not going to be a big part of your mix unless you're already got it, you know, if you've got an ad strategy or you're using, you know, doing some programmatic ads, it's probably not the end of the world. Well, and I think that that's a really good point that that's really the big impact on you know the cookie less future. Um, I wish there was a better way to say that, but it's not. Um, you know, the way that I've been talking about it when asked is it's going to really force companies that have been lazy about their customer experience to really rethink it because the whole the whole point is that you know, right now we're reliant on third-party data.

And you know, that's the retargeting, that kind of stuff. But what's gonna happen is we're gonna be, you know, asked to get this first party data, which is where the customer is opting in to give you information. And so now you as a company have to be creating something, whether it be you know a white paper, content, product, service, whatever, compelling enough that people are willing to give you some information about them that they'll opt into saying, yes, you can have my name and my email address, or you can have my phone number, or you can have any other information about me. It is now your job to create even more engaging and compelling things because you can't rely on someone coming to your website going, oops, I didn't want that thing, but you've cooked them and now you can show them ads literally everywhere on the internet. Um, you know, without fail.

I think there was an ad I saw in one of my social media feeds, and I disabled it no less than half a dozen times and it kept showing up that was so persistent to the point where like I would never become their customer just because of that terrible experience because I didn't want the thing in the first place, but they cookied me because I was doing some research for a client, and now I can't escape the ad. And that's gonna be the big impact on companies like that that are so reliant on that strategy to your point, John, about the programmatic ads, where they're just retargeting to no end, regardless of whether or not you want the thing. It's sort of the I'm gonna wear you down by showing you this thing so much that you're like, fine, I'll just buy it as long as you stop showing me ads. That's not gonna be an option anymore. That topic is gonna go with thankfully.

Yeah, and well, and because part of that is you have vendors that use multiple programmatic vendors, you know. So it's like you you can be refusing this ad over here, and that will get you out of these four, you know, two or three platforms over here, but you're still getting ads, you know, retargeted from other platforms. So yeah, I think I a lot of that I think is at the core of why people are angry about this stuff and why it wants to go because it keeps chasing you. And yeah, I think that the industry is uh cut off their nose to spite their face, even like you know, they could come up with industry solutions as far as you know, click the hey, I already bought this button to make these ads go away. But the reality is kind of everybody in the ecosystem gets paid and doesn't want to make that more efficient, and so now they're kind of losing rights to do it completely.

So I guess that's just the way that's gonna go. Yeah. Well, and so that nicely, I'm trying to get every question to sort of lead into the next one. I think we can probably tackle one, maybe two more questions. Um, question, should I get a CDP?

And for those who don't know, CDP is a customer data platform that this will probably give away how I feel about it, but allegedly it's supposed to bring in all of your data from all of your different Martech stack systems into one place and magically give you a single view of the customer. Um that's not to say you shouldn't get one. I say proceed with caution and do not skip business requirements gathering. Do not skip that step. Do not just go out and buy a CDP, sit it on top of everything, and then wonder why it's not working.

Yeah, and it's a tough question. I I think this is an org and enterprise level thing. You know, like if you're an enterprise company, if you're already spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on Oracle and IBM to analyze your data or something, then yes, you CDP needs to be on your roadmap somewhere. Um, if you're a small to mid-size business, yeah, you especially and you hit it there. You shouldn't just be building it for the sake of building it because you want all this data, you should first be going through and say, well, what kind of data should we be gathering that we know for sure affects the business?

You know, once you've got all that data, then maybe if you reach a point where your data scientists are saying, hey, you know, we only have data about transactions and site visits, we would really like data about who these people are and and where they go. And yeah, ultimately, you know, when we talk about looking at your artificial intelligence strategy, you know, if your CEO says, Hey, I want our AI strategy, well, then yeah, CDP needs to be part of your mix, you know, because the the goal with that ultimately is that you have a profile of your customers and you have so much data that you're able to offer them products or services that only you know they need because only you have that much information about them, right? It's the classic Amazon play of like no other online merchant can uh you know have Alexa ask me in the morning if I want to buy a projector because they know that I've bought these five other things. Like nobody else can do that because they're the only ones that know how to do that. But yeah, you know, for everybody else, it's it's tough to make a case for the fact that you should just be gathering all the data.

When what what we see, the thing that we're always counseling clients on is look, you've got way too much data. You need to pare this down to the stuff that you know matters and and be acting on that. Like if you're not analyzing your open and click data for email and you're not analyzing your website data for what content is the most effective at, you know, doing creating conversions, if you're not doing that kind of stuff, you shouldn't be adding more data to the pile. Like you should be optimizing what you have and where you want to go. Um yeah, I don't know.

I never even thought about it this way, but I a good answer is like, well, if you haven't hired a day, if you don't have a data scientist on staff, then you definitely don't need to spend the time on a CDP. Um if you do have a data scientist on staff, then maybe that's something you want to start talking about. You know, or a data scientist for hire, like Chris, if you're interested in that, which contact us. Yeah, right. It's you know, why take on a 250k a year employee when you could hire somebody to come in and at least like give you some of the value first, so you can at least prove that it works before you have to figure out how to fire Dr.

Lucius, who's taking up space in the in the back room. Well, and you know, I think you hit on a lot of really good points because it really does come down to do you are you collecting the right data that would give you that single view of the customer, you know, magical, you know, thing that you're after, that one single data point, you may not even be collecting that data first. And so you really need to start with your requirements, and you need to start with your you know uh data requirements plan, your business requirements plan, why do you need this information? What are you going to do with this information? Who's going to maintain the system?

Because it's definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing. Like it's a system that constantly needs maintenance. Um, you know, because you have new data coming into it all the time. There needs to be a plan for cleaning that data, maintaining that data, transforming that data, analyzing that data. That's a couple of people doing that job, but first you have to plan that out.

Um, I think the other considerations for a CDP, which again, not to stop you from getting one, but things that you should be thinking about are data privacy, you know, regulations and HIPAA and PHI and PII. Um, you know, where does that fall into the CDP that you're evaluating? Is that something that the CDP automatically takes care of for you and makes sure that you're compliant, or is the CDP asking you, the customer, to be responsible for those things? Because that's a whole other skill set in terms of knowing and understanding all of those rules and regulations so that you're not violating them because the fines can be pretty hefty if you do. And so making sure that you have that kind of an understanding as well, as you're trying to get very granular in the information about any one single customer.

Yeah, and uh we have to drive that point home too. That you just talked about is the fact that so if it's a third-party CDP, you have all these integration points. And at any other time when you add remove a tool, update a tool, there's a chance that you're gonna have to change the configuration of the CVP. So it's not yet set it, forget it is definitely not on the menu. Um so, John, do you want to try to tackle one more question or should we start wrapping it up?

How are you feeling? Yeah, no, if there's another good one. Oh, we there was one question about using Search Console to evaluate your SEO efforts. Um, like the short answer is no. I mean, you use Search Console to make sure that your site is not screwed up and broken, and that does have SEO implications, but um, yeah, everybody should be using Search Console.

So anything else on there that you thought was hot. I'm just gonna pull up um Search Console real quick. That um sort of as a kind of board, like yes, you should be using Search Console for your SEO. Um, I guess maybe not a counterpoint, but basically, you know, if you're not using Search Console for your SEO, you know, audits for your SEO strategy, then you know you definitely should be. Um, if you're using big webmaster tools instead, they have a similar system, but just understanding the health of your site in terms of what Google sees, because that's really what this is is this is a reflection of what Google sees, and so making sure that you know you have a good you know page experience, making sure that your core web vitals um are in good shape in terms of you don't have any poor URLs because basically what happens is that Google says, you know what, this person's not staying up to date with keeping things neat and tidy and following in line with what I want.

So I'm gonna shop, I'm gonna stop showing their site, I'm gonna stop showing their content until they get it together and fix these things. So that's piece one that you need to take into consideration. The other thing is that different from SEO tools, you can get information about how people are finding you. Um so you know, we we know that people are finding us based on our name, um, disadvantages of predictive analytics, limitations. These are all things that we've written about, Google Analytics Migration Services.

And this tells us that these are the pages on our website that we need to keep the most up to date and tuned in. So long story short, if you are not using Search Console to round out your SEO, you are definitely missing the boat. And you know, obviously, a plug, we have a course that walks you through every single feature in Search Console so that you can make sure, especially if you are responsible for SEO or content marketing in your organization. If you're not currently using Search Console, then you definitely have chunks of the picture missing. Oh, you know, I had a one tip out the door I wanted to throw too is that always have an inventory of what your employees know, because uh it's insane.

I've seen organizations where you know you go in and you find out 90% of the sales staff has used Salesforce for over five years or what it like, don't bother any other tool, just go by Salesforce, let them start running with it immediately. So you don't have to go through two months' worth of training, but having a staff inventory of tools that they know how to use can save you a lot of headache and highlight new opportunity for you. Um so as we're wrapping up, we do have one question that I think is worth tackling. So, John, um, how does CDP compare to CRM? Same thing, but new acronym?

Yeah, that's a great. So there's like a whole fight on Martech about this because the uh editor over there, um Scott Brinkner. Kim Davis, Kim Davidson. Uh Scott is like the figurehead. He actually works at HubSpot, and but he's the guy that created it all.

Uh Kim Davis is the editor of the newsletter. And so he's the front of, and yeah, so Kim kind of said that they were the same. And David Rabb, who's uh the basically number one CDP consultant out there right now, took him to task on that and they issued an apology and everything. But the short version, yeah, I'm gonna give you my version, which is not that popular either, is that CDP is sort of a vendor construct, right? Like you have no customers saying, Oh, I need to buy a CDP yet.

Like nobody understands what that is. But the big idea is what what they're saying is CRM is focused on a customer. So you're only interested in prospects, customers, the transactions they've made, the pipeline, you want to be able to see the deals. Like that's the heart of a CRM. Whereas a CDP is all the data you can gather on a customer and have it in one place.

So you do have um all of your transactions and interactions with the training department and the support department and what events they've gone to and all that stuff. But then a lot of CDPs you want to layer on third-party data too, as far as you know, their demographic, photographic, technographic info, all this kind of stuff. Um and so that's CRM. You don't want to say it's a subset, but the idea is that CDP is a much bigger chunk of data. But CDP is an emerging space.

Like there's no vendor that has um kind of shown itself to be the king of the space because a lot of bigger orgs have already built these things. They've built data lakes or um big data, you know, choose your buzzword for that, but they've kind of already done. And Oracle would argue like, why do you need a CDP? Because you have Oracle. We've been doing this forever.

Um, but that's that's the kind of that's the way of the land does of today. Yeah. No, I I agree with that. So all right, with that, I think we've sort of talked through as much as we can in terms of Martex stacks. Um, if you have questions that we haven't answered, please feel free to join us over in our free Slack group, trustinsights.ai slash analytics for marketers, where we have over 2500 uh marketers like yourself asking questions, getting answers, networking, listening to Chris John and I ramble on about whatever music we're listening to that day.

So definitely feel free to join us. And then next week, uh John, I think you and Chris are talking about the pros and cons and best practices of launching books. Because you've both done it. You've both published books, you're both authors. And so what are people missing the boat on in terms of book launching?

So if you're interested in that, tune in next week at 1 p.m. Eastern on our YouTube channel, trustinsights.ai slash YouTube. John, parting thoughts. Buy the book, yeah. All right, until next week.

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