It’s time to demystify your marketing data and customer data platforms (CDPs) with author, Marketing Data Consultant, and Founder of the CDP Institute, David Raab. Data is such a big part of marketing today and it’s becoming more and more necessary to rely on technology to gather and organize customer data. This episode will teach you all about the purpose of using a CDP to organize your gathered data for marketing use.   Takeaways: Figure out your own requirements and use cases then find a tool that does what you need. Don’t just use tech because it’s what everyone else is doing. It’s easy to overlook your requirements gathering. Think about what you need to do first. Determine tasks you need your marketing tech to accomplish then sit down with the salesperson to find out how that product will work for you. When deciding to gather marketing data, put together the strategy first, develop your process and leave the technology for later. When it comes to multi-touch reporting, do it right. Get your data first then normalize it. Customer Data Platforms make your collected data easy to understand by building a database. They get all the data together in one place then enable your systems to use it. Involve your IT department in implementing the technology for system and security purposes but the Marketers should be the ones running the platform and making the decisions on the technology’s use.   Links: Twitter: @draab LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-raab-22146b/ CDP Institute site: https://www.cdpinstitute.org/ Website: http://raabassociatesinc.com/ Blog:  http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/