B2B Edition

Getting started with Real-Time Customer Data Platform B2B Edition

Last update: December 16, 2024

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This document provides a high-level end-to-end workflow for getting started with Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) B2B Edition, using an example use case to illustrate key concepts.

The technology company Bodea wants to combine person and account data from different siloed data sources in order to effectively target customers with an email and a LinkedIn advertisement campaign for its new product. Bodea uses Marketo Engage as its marketing automation platform and needs to segment a B2B-specific audience from multiple CRMs containing customer data.

Getting started

This tutorial workflow relies on several Adobe Experience Platform services as part of the demonstration. If you want to follow along it is recommended to have a good understanding of the following services:

Create schemas for your data

As part of the initial setup, Bodea’s IT department needs to create an XDM schema to ensure that their data follows a standard format when being brought into Platform, and is actionable across different Platform services and Adobe Experience Cloud products (such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target).

WARNING
You must follow the ingestion patterns as described in the relevant sources documentation linked to throughout this tutorial. Other field mapping methods are not guaranteed to work.

Adobe Experience Platform allows you to automatically generate the schemas and namespaces required for B2B data sources. This tool ensures that the schemas created describe the data in a structured reusable way. Follow the B2B namespaces and schema auto-generation utility documentation for a complete reference to the setup process.

Within the Adobe Experience Platform UI, the Bodea marketer selects Schemas in the left rail, followed by the Browse tab. Since they used the Marketo Engage auto-generation utility, the new empty schemas appear in the list and all have a prefix of “B2B”.

Schema workspace browse tab

The auto-generation utility defined the data model structure for the schemas using standard XDM B2B classes (such as XDM Business Account and XDM Business Opportunity) that capture fundamental B2B data entities. In addition, the auto-generated B2B schemas built on these classes have pre-established relationships that allow for advanced segmentation use cases. Any additional field groups required for the data structure can easily be made here through the UI. See the XDM UI guide, adding field groups to a schema section for more information.

NOTE
If you are not using the auto-generator utility or should a new relationship need to be created, see the tutorial on creating relationships between B2B schemas.

Real-Time Customer Profile merges data from disparate sources to create consolidated profiles of key B2B entities. Since profiles are generated based on a single class, the auto-generation utility sets up relationships between schemas based on common business use cases. As a result, the Bodea team is now ready to ingest data based on their B2B schemas.

NOTE
Default identity namespaces, primary keys, and relationships created for the schemas by the auto-generation utility are easily discoverable within the Schema workspace.
default schema identity and relationship UI display

Ingest your data into Experience Platform

Next, the Bodea marketer uses the Marketo Engage connector to ingest data into Platform for use in downstream services. You can also ingest data by using one of the approved sources for Real-Time CDP B2B Edition.

NOTE
To learn which source connectors are available to your organization, you can view the sources catalog in the Platform UI. To access the catalog, select Sources in the left navigation, then select Catalog.

In order to create a connection between a Marketo account and Platform, you must acquire authentication credentials. See the guide on attaining Marketo source connector authentication credentials for detailed instructions.

After acquiring authentication credentials, the Bodea marketer creates a connection between the Marketo Account and their Platform organization. See the documentation for instructions on how to connect a Marketo Account using the Platform UI.

The Marketo Engage source connector provides an auto-mapping feature to make the process of mapping all of your data fields to those of the newly created schemas much easier.

NOTE
If you have made custom field groups in your XDM schemas you may have unconnected fields at this stage of the process. Make sure to check all the values that are populating your custom field groups.

The Bodea marketer checks that all field groups are appropriately mapped and continues the sources setup process by initializing a dataflow. By creating a dataflow to bring in Marketo data, incoming data can be used by downstream Platform services. During the initial ingestion process, data is brought into Experience Platform as a batch. After this, subsequent ingested data is then streamed into Profile with near-real-time updates.

Create an audience to evaluate your data

The next task is to create an audience for Bodea’s new email marketing campaign based on specific attributes from related entities in the source data. Within the Platform UI, the Bodea marketer first selects Segments in the left navigation, then Create segment.

In this example, the audience finds all the people who work in the sales department and are related to any account that has at least one open opportunity. This audiences requires a link between the XDM Individual Profile class, XDM Business Account class, and XDM Business Opportunity class.

Use case segment

NOTE
For instructions on how to create audiences to evaluate your data see the Segment Builder UI guide. For more specific B2B segmentation use cases, refer to the segmentation overview for Real-Time CDP B2B Edition.

The Segment Builder allows you to create a marketable audience from Real-Time Customer Profile data and view estimates of your prospective audience based on the combination of attributes, events, and existing audiences you defined.

Activate your evaluated data to a destination

After the audience is successfully created, a summary is provided in the Details section of the workspace. As no destinations are currently activated for the segment definition, the Bodea marketer needs to export the audience to a dataset where it can be accessed and acted upon.

Within the Segments workspace of the Platform UI, the Bodea marketer selects Activate to destination.

Activate the audience to a destination

NOTE
See the tutorial on activating an audience to a destination for comprehensive steps on how to accomplish this.

The Bodea marketer activates the audience to the Marketo destination, which allows them to push audience data from Platform to Marketo Engage in the form of a static list. See the guide on the Marketo destination for more information.