Learn how to get the most out of Adobe Expereince Platform with practical best practices for implementing a Real-Time Customer Data Platform. Build an Audience Center of Excellence that turns data into action, drives smarter segmentation and personalization, and keeps your customers coming back.

Introduction

Whether you are just getting started with Real-Time Customer Data Platform or already deep into your Adobe Experience Platform journey, having a clear, strategic roadmap can make all the difference. This guide is designed to help you get the most out of your Adobe Experience Platform investment—no matter where you are in the process.

If you are just getting started with your implementation, you might be focused on setting up Real-Time Customer Data Platform and laying the groundwork for an audience center of excellence. Or maybe you are further along—scaling use cases and integrating more data sources. Wherever you are on the journey, success comes down to taking a use case-driven approach that puts data and insights at the heart of your marketing execution. It is all about aligning your strategy with your organization’s goals and making the most of the resources you have.

We will walk through how to build an audience center of excellence that not only supports smarter segmentation and personalization but also helps your team move faster with fewer resources. From aligning stakeholders to activating audiences across channels, this roadmap is all about turning strategy into action—and results.

Audiences landscape today

In today's digital age, marketing is no longer just about reaching out to potential customers; it is about understanding and engaging with them on a deeper level across any touch point they interact with. The landscape of audiences has evolved significantly, with marketers now leveraging diverse data sources to build comprehensive audience profiles. Having a data-driven approach informed by specific use cases helps in creating personalized experiences that resonate with both B2B, B2BB2C, and B2C audiences.

When you define clear use cases for Adobe Experience Platform, something important starts to emerge: your organization’s data needs are not one-size-fits-all. Different markets often require different data strategies—and your industry needs plays a key role too.

Take healthcare, for example. You are dealing with sensitive patient data that must meet strict privacy standards. In banking, it is all about financial transactions and credit data that demand increased levels of security and precision. And in communication services, the focus shifts to product and service usage data that helps personalize customer experiences.

Understanding these unique data requirements is key to building an audience strategy that is not only effective but also scalable and compliant. It is how you turn Adobe Experience Platform into a competitive advantage.

When developing your go-to-market strategy, it is essential to recognize the distinct characteristics of B2B and B2C audiences. Each has unique goals, pain points, and decision-making behaviors. B2B audiences—such as enterprise decision-makers—tend to prioritize ROI, operational efficiency, and long-term value. In contrast, B2C audiences are typically driven by personal satisfaction, convenience, and lifestyle alignment.

Additionally, consider the B2BB2C model if it applies to your business. This approach involves certain brands that sell to other businesses, which then produce consumer-facing products. It is a hybrid model that blends B2B and B2C dynamics, offering unique opportunities to influence both business partners and end consumers.

Understanding these differences is critical for marketing teams aiming to execute effectively across the diverse audiences they serve.

Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation approach

Implementing a Real-Time Customer Data Platform requires methodical planning and resource allocation. Planning is critical for several reasons, for starters, once you build your schema, you cannot undo it. Planning also ensures that the marketing technology roadmap that you are defining is aligned to the business objectives that show the value of the capabilities. This level of precision in planning is critical to avoid scope creep and running into unidentified risks.

If you do not have defined audiences, work with your marketing team to define core audiences to establish an audience center of excellence powered by technology and data and execute on the specific defined use cases to show initial outcomes of the adoption. This approach will benefit you in two folds. First, it will help you determine which audience to prioritize in your use case selection and secondly to develop consistent engagement strategies and journeys aligned with the audiences built in Real-Time Customer Data Platform.

From a use case perspective, you should also consider keeping the initial use cases straightforward and simple, how?

• Focus on one of the core audiences.
• Execute the use case in only one channel, then expand later.

With the goal of achieving the following objectives:

• Functionality verification – is everything working as expected?
• Momentum – Complete the use case and use the momentum to inform about new capabilities.
• Insights – Gather insights on how the use case went, team project performance, and platform.

Keep in mind that over time, as you continue to scale your capabilities with the Real-Time Customer Data Platform and ramp up the adoption curve, the goals of your key stakeholders will change. Finally, integrating enterprise marketing technology tools into daily digital marketing operations will require time.

Additionally, you must consider having robust data collection and measurement strategies. Having a sound data collection strategy will enable you to extend the reach and add richness to your audience data. As part of the data collection effort, ensure that the IDs from the different systems that have been captured are properly mapped in the profile mapping to consolidate identities.

Keep in mind that for some third-party identities, they can only be synced using a Data Management Platform like Adobe Audience Manager.

As for the measurement strategy, it is imperative to ensure the data is there to measure the results of our campaigns to prove the value of Adobe Experience Platform. Agreeing on the KPIs with your stakeholders in the planning phase, especially early in the implementation process, will ensure the performance of conversations are more aligned and constructive.

Simply put, be in the mindset of ABC (Always Be Collecting) for the data related to your use cases and marketing efforts.

This concept of data collection also extends to cookies. Despite ongoing discussions about cookie deprecation from publishers and third-party sources, cookies have not been fully phased out. It is important to evaluate which cookies should be collected from the platforms where your audiences are activated, as this can help grow both the size and richness of your audience profiles. Keep in mind that some third-party cookies can only be collected through a Data Management Platform (DMP), such as Adobe Audience Manager.

Alignment and collaboration

To Implement Real-Time Customer Data Platform and become an audience-led organization, you must bring the people and the processes along on the transformation journey.

From a people perspective, start by identifying cultural change champions in your organization. These advocates can be found at any level and play a key role in promoting the platform’s value, sharing success stories, and encouraging adoption across teams.

Equally important is communication. Use your internal channels to regularly update stakeholders on progress—highlighting use case wins, new capabilities that enhance workflows, and insights that align with business goals. Transparency and storytelling go a long way in reinforcing the impact of Real-Time Customer Data Platform and sustaining engagement.

Creating an Audience Center of Excellence (COE) involves defining core audiences that are identified as part of your organization’s strategy and go to market motions. In this process, it is critical to establish stringent standards for audience definitions to get organizational alignment.

This alignment should be overseen with direction and sign off from the leadership team. Otherwise, it will fail before it gets started.

Additionally, it is important to ensure that the analytics team also agrees with the audience definitions to ensure they have an approach to measure performance for related marketing activities and the health of the audience sizes.

Finally, these audiences can be operationalized in workflows related to audiences and campaigns to ensure that every request is mapped to a particular audience. For example, you can add the audiences in Workfront forms and intakes. This approach helps enforce change management to use the defined audiences across your organization and in developing consistent engagement strategies and journeys aligned with the audiences built in Real-Time Customer Data Platform. Here are the step-by-step details of the approach:

Audiences

To build comprehensive audience profiles, marketers can leverage various data types, including psychographic, behavioral, firmographic, and demographic data. These data types serve as building blocks for defining new audiences, building look-a-like audiences, and retargeting existing audiences. Look at the image below as an example of the data types:

Define a use case with precision

Defining a use case with precision is crucial for successful Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation. Here is an example of the requirements collected for an initial use case to implement the platform:

The benefit of defining your use case is that the information serves as a source of truth for the audience that you have collaborated with your marketing team to define and build.

When defining a use case, start by aligning your team around the “why” behind each use case. When everyone understands the intent and expected outcomes, it’s easier to drive focus and accountability.

Through the use cases, you will be able to verify platform functionality and compliance, an essential foundation in today’s regulatory environment. It also gets the momentum going within the organization and highlights early wins.

Finally, it creates a culture of continuously learning and evolving. It is important to track both platform enablement metrics and individual use case performance to get a full picture of impact. The goal is not perfection—it is progress. Scale what works, refine what does not, and apply those insights across the organization to accelerate success.

Audience development in Real-Time Customer Data Platform

Let us dive into the building blocks of audience creation in Real-Time Customer Data Platform. There are three data types that are available to you to build audiences from the segmentation user interface. They are Attributes, Events and Audiences, as shown in the image below:

From an audience development perspective, there are two primary ways to build audiences, one way is using the compose audiences feature and the other is using the build rule.

Build rule

One of the most empowering features of modern audience-building tools is the intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. Designed with marketers in mind, this canvas-based UI allows you to construct complex audience rules using logical operators and containers. Whether you are creating nested queries, defining inclusions, or setting exclusions, the experience is both visual and flexible — no coding required.

Key tips to keep in mind

1. Do not forget to set a lookback window — When defining your audience, always specify the lookback period. This ensures you are capturing the right behavioral data over the right timeframe — critical for real-time personalization and targeting.

2. Planning to integrate Adobe Analytics? Standardize early — If your organization uses multiple Adobe Analytics reporting suites, consistency is key. Use common, user-friendly naming conventions across suites to avoid confusion and streamline your implementation process.

3. Bulk uploads = big time savings — Working with large datasets? The bulk upload feature in the build rule is your best friend. For example, let us say you work for a leading retailer, and you have 600 SKUs that you need to add to your audience logic for a campaign to retarget customers that viewed those products to tell them about an upcoming promotion. Using the build upload feature, you can break up the list of SKUs into three CSV files (up to 250 values each) and upload them directly into the UI. It is a fast, efficient way to quickly add your audience rules without manual entry.

Compose audiences

Now, let us explore how you build audiences using the Compose Audience feature. Whether you are refining an existing audience or stacking multiple segments together, this capability gives you the flexibility to tailor your targeting strategy with precision.

What can you do with Compose Audience?

One of the most common — and valuable — uses of Compose Audience is to add suppression audiences. This helps ensure you are not targeting users who should not receive a particular message. You can also remove overlapping segments to avoid redundancy or audience fatigue. In addition to this common application, you can enrich, rank or split audiences.

Just remember: any audience you want to use must be published first. That is a key step before you can include it in your composition.

Let us say you work in the banking sector and planning to promote a new credit card. You might want to target active customers with existing accounts but exclude those who already have a mortgage or have recently applied for another credit card. Using Compose Audiences, you can easily build this logic in the canvas and target your defined audience.

Audience activation

Destinations

Now that you have built your audience and you are ready to use them for a campaign. You need to activate the audience, which involves sending them to various destinations for personalized marketing campaigns. Since you’re at the stage of sending your valuable audience data externally, you must ensure that you’re sharing in a manner that is secure and compliant, you can do that by ensuring the personally identifiable information (PII) identifier used for activation is either the hashed field in your schema or apply SHA256 transformation during the audience activation workflow. You should also consider the following best practices:

1. As you are working with the campaign team and preparing to launch a campaign. Ensure that you provide audience counts based on the identifier used for the activation platform. This will ensure that the count that you have shared is close to the matched audience count number in the activation platform as part of the audience validation steps.
2. Keep in mind that audience data may take time to accumulate as the audiences are being shared across systems and platforms.
3. Send a test audience to validate a newly integrated destination.
4. Standardize the naming conventions of destinations as you may have several accounts for each destination.

Extensions

When it comes to extensions, think of them as data leveraged from partners or activation platforms (e.g., LinkedIn) to help coordinate audience journeys based on external interaction events. For example, if you are in the healthcare industry and running a winter campaign on Instagram to inform your audience about the seasonal flu, you might capture event data showing which audience members have already been vaccinated. If your campaign strategy calls for removing vaccinated individuals—since they have already converted and completed the desired action—you can use that event data to exclude them from the active campaign or trigger new content based on qualification rules defined in the Instagram campaign.

Keep in mind that enabling additional destination channels and extensions will expand the utility of the Real-Time Customer Data Platform and speed up the adoption process in your organization.

From strategy to insight to activation: How Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Customer Journey Analytics work together

In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, centralizing your audience strategy and capabilities is just the beginning. Once you have laid that foundation with Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform, the next step is to elevate your insights and measurement capabilities—and streamline workflows to move efficiently from insights to activation. That is where Customer Journey Analytics comes in.

Enabling Customer Journey Analytics is essential for simplifying the path from insights to audience creation and activation. One of its most powerful features is the ability to create audiences directly within the platform and send them to Real-Time Customer Data Platform for activation. Additionally, Customer Journey Analytics can unify data from multiple sources, for example, combining Google Ads, web analytics, and marketing automation data—to provide a more comprehensive view of your audience and their cross-platform interactions.

Customer Journey Analytics can transform marketing workflows and foster a data-driven culture by bringing marketers closer to actionable insights. To build awareness and support adoption, consider the following steps:

1. Create audience dashboards tailored to each marketing team to provide a continuous stream of audience insights.
2. Share reports in formats that are accessible and meaningful to your end users.
3. Include visualizations and concise text summaries in your reports and dashboards to highlight key insights.

Operational best practices

Finally, as you work to enable the technologies and bring your teams along on the journey, it is essential to define—or redefine—key processes to support the ongoing transformation driven by Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation. Here are several process considerations to help ensure long-term success:

1. Leverage folders and tags in Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Customer Journey Analytics: Use folders to organize core audiences, dashboards, and reports that are frequently used. Create metadata tags to make it easier to locate assets across platforms.
2. Establish standard audience naming conventions: Collaborate with marketing and analytics teams to define consistent naming conventions. Be mindful of character limitations specific to each platform.
3. Purge Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Customer Journey Analytics on a recurring basis: Regularly delete outdated connections, and archive or remove old audiences and reports to maintain a clean and efficient environment.
4. Enforce data usage policies: Apply governance policies to your datasets to mitigate risks and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
5. Monitor Real-Time Customer Data Platform data flows: Set up a process to routinely monitor data flows and confirm that all jobs are running successfully.

Conclusion

With the strategies and insights shared, you are now better equipped to modernize your marketing operations by activating Adobe Experience Platform’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Customer Journey Analytics. This transformation is not just about technology; it’s about aligning people, processes, and platforms to become a truly audience-led organization. Let us summarize the key takeaways:

Strategies for Real-Time Customer Data Platform implementation and roadmap

1. Start simple: Focus your initial use case on one audience and one channel to build momentum and gather learnings.
2. Be use case-led: Every feature and data point added to Real-Time Customer Data Platform should directly support a defined use case.
3. Build lean workflows: Create an operating framework that works with limited resources by lowering the barrier from insights to activation.
4. Leverage Customer Journey Analytics: Use to generate insights that inform and refine your audience segments.

Approach to build an audience center of excellence

1. Align definitions: Collaborate with marketing stakeholders to define key audiences and establish shared measurement criteria.
2. Optimize continuously: Refine defined audiences based on evolving needs.
3. Avoid duplication: Work cross-functionally to onboard audiences from different systems and prevent duplicating audiences in different platforms.
4. Enforce audience change management: Create a menu of core audiences and embed them into intake forms to support change management.
5. Democratize audience data: Build Customer Journey Analytics dashboards for core audiences to provide ongoing insights to marketing teams.

Tactics for audience activation

1. Plan for third-party identifiers: While cookies are still around, develop strategies for using third-party identifiers effectively.
2. Define data needs: Clearly outline the data required to build audiences, the destinations for activation, and any extensions that support journey orchestration.

By following these best practices, grounded in Adobe Experience Platform’s capabilities and supported by a strong audience governance model, you can drive meaningful transformation. Aligning technology with people and processes will help your organization deliver smarter, more personalized audience experiences.