What Is the Difference Between DXP and CDP?

Marketers are expected to cater to current and potential customers at every stage of the buying process, and increasingly, customers expect a much more personalized experience. It can be tough for marketers to keep up with creating the right content at the right time in the process, but there are a number of excellent tools available to help.

Marketers and sales teams can now create quality digital experiences to help persuade customers to buy and help them at every stage of the buying process, including once they’ve made a purchase.

But do marketers need a DXP or a CDP, or a combination of these things? And what in the alphabet soup do they mean?

What Is DXP?

The DXP meaning is Digital Experience Platform and this type of software can make all the difference to marketers and other areas of a business, such as sales, human resources, quality control, customer service, and outside partners, such as agencies. These DXP technologies enable anyone across your business to create and manage quality digital experiences for internal and external customers, such as sales pages, digital product sheets, landing pages, full websites or microsites, operating manuals, portals, sales resources, and more. Every one of these experiences can be created to personalize and enhance the customer journey through the buying process.

While none of those experiences sound particularly new, the difference is that with a professional DXP, marketers no longer have to rely on programmers to create code to help them build these experiences. Nor do they have to outsource this side of marketing to expensive agencies. With a quality DXP, any digital experience can be created quickly, either from scratch or by using a provided template, without having to use or understand a single line of code. This allows marketers and other staff members to quickly adapt and react to customer needs and demands and create exactly what customers are looking for from the first time they find your company to the moment they start to use their newly purchased product.

DXP software allows marketers to save time and money, while still providing a quality customer experience.

Some DXP platforms allow you to build only the front-end design of any digital experience, but others, such as Lumavate, allow you to create everything from start to finish, without needing to know or use any code. Most DXPs also include a content management system (CMS) so that marketers can manage their content, including audio, images, videos, documents, PDFs, text, and more. However, not all of them provide a full digital asset management (DAM) solution or a product information management (PIM), like Lumavate does.

What Is an Example of a DXP Platform?

There are a range of DXP platforms available for marketers to choose from. Options include Lumavate, Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Acquia, Optimizely, Liferay, and more. With each of these platforms, you can create digital experiences to a greater or lesser extent. However, they aren’t all equal in terms of ease of use, ease of setup, cost, and functionality.

Adobe Experience Manager, for example, is otherwise known as Adobe DXP, and it does offer a lot of functionality to users. However, it also requires a great amount of technical resources and often outside consultants to set it up. It also has quite the learning curve, all of which adds to the cost of setup, and the amount of time before people are used to using it.

Other DXP examples may be easier to implement, but they don’t necessarily have all the functionality you might need.

In contrast, not only is Lumavate so easy to set up that it can be done by anyone in the marketing department without the help of IT, but it also offers far more functionality than many DXPs.

• With Lumavate, you get a fully functioning DXP, but it also comes with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to control and manage your images, videos, reels, documents, audio files, and more.

• Lumavate also includes a Product Information Management system to collate, control, and manage your product information, including data sheets, operating manuals, marketing materials, and other items.

• We also include a Content Management System (CMS), form builder, text messaging functionality, and more than 40 out-of-the-box integrations.

What Is the Difference Between DXP and CMS?

When it comes to DXP vs CMS or even Headless CMS vs DXP, there are various options to think about before you choose a DXP. Not only do you have a long list of digital platforms and DXP companies to choose from, such as Lumavate, Sitecore DXP, Salesforce DXP, or Oracle DXP, but you need to decide what your aims are for your business and what you need this software to do.

However, it’s probably best to start by explaining all those terms. We’ve already explained that DXP is a Digital Experience Platform, and that CMS stands for Content Management System. Those should be quite familiar to marketers and salespeople, but what’s the difference between a CMS and a Headless CMS and where does a DXP actually come in?

Well, we’ve talked in detail above about how much functionality a DXP can have and how it can control your content and produce top-quality digital experiences. A quality DXP enables business users to build and iterate on digital experiences with an easy-to-use front-end builder that doesn’t require code.

A CMS, on the other hand, can’t do more than store and manage your content. You would be able to store any digital experiences you create, such as product catalogs, data sheets, and others in your CMS after you create them, but you can’t create any product experiences with just a CMS.

A headless CMS is a content management system that only manages your content without providing a front-end experience. What you can do is connect a composable DXP to a headless CMS to provide the front-end experience.

However, the best DXPs come with a built-in CMS or DAM to enable the effective management of your content and digital assets used across digital experiences. Lumavate is one such DXP that includes both a CMS and a DAM, along with other functionalities for a smooth, easy experience when managing content and creating excellent digital experiences for your customers.

What Is the Difference Between DXP and CDP?

A DXP, such as Lumavate, offers a great amount of functionality, flexibility, and integration to enable businesses to run their marketing and digital experiences in exactly the way they want to. Lumavate can integrate easily with other software you might already have, such as Salesforce, for example, while reducing the amount of Salesforce licenses you need and lowering costs.

You can build and iterate on your digital experiences to create just the right experience at the right time for your customers, whether internal or external. Lumavate also has an easy-to-use front-end builder that doesn’t require code. Unlike some other DXP platforms, Lumavate also incorporates a CMS and a DAM to allow you to easily manage your content, product information, and digital assets to create top-quality digital experiences.

What we haven’t talked about yet is a CDP, which stands for Customer Data Platform. While a PIM collects and manages product information, a CDP instead focuses on managing your customer data across your business. While, of course, data management and analysis are vital for any business, however, that is all a CDP can do. A CDP does not have any DXP functionality and cannot create any digital experiences.

Obviously, you need quality customer data, managed well and analyzed carefully so that you can create the right marketing experience for each segment of your audience at the right stage of the buyer’s journey. However, you can have the best of both worlds here, either by choosing a DXP that also offers CDP functionality within its platform, or by finding the right DXP that can integrate well with your CDP solution.