A data management platform works as a warehouse, collecting, organizing and activating third-party data in a single place. Keep up and find out how to benefit from it!
Data is a crucial resource in this business era. However, it can be useless if the company doesn’t know how to professionally manage all that amount of information, wasting thousands of dollars advertising to an incomplete or insufficient database usage.
In a digital world of first, second and third-party information, a Data Management Platform, also known as DMP, can transform piles of databases into profitable resources. Take a look!
What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)
Customer experience is not a linear walk. They will leave crumbs of information all the way along their relationship journey with a company. That process results in the accumulation millions of data throughout the years from multiple sources.
Most times, those data can seem random, incoherent or fragmented. That may happen when there is no right management of it.
Then, some questions become trivial:
- Who are the visitors on my website?
- What are they looking for?
- How can you have direct contact with them?
- Why they are not making deals with me?
A data management platform (DMP) is a tool to filter all those pieces of information into organized profiles for audience segmentation or insights for decision-making.
After that, your company will know exactly who they supposed to talk to; how these audiences behave; what is the best approach along the sales funnel to them; if the investment made in advertisement campaigns has the appropriate segment and more.
You can even create cross-media analysis, which is when multiple platforms, on and offline, can support the same campaign.
How Does a DMP Work?
Operating as a central intelligence system for digital marketing, a DMP creates a perfect definition of your ideal customer by organizing millions of information into demographic, consuming habits, interests and so on.
You can obtain new forms of segmentation through DMP, such as a non-dependent on the context or content one. This new segment is now based on the profile of the audience, regardless of the advertisement subject or the platform displayed.
To function, a data management platform operates in four steps:
Collect
It all begins with data collection, third-party information acquired by relevant partners with similar or identical market spaces. These data can be provided from CRMs, customers’ registration, e-mails, website data, previous purchases and whatever more relevant material is available.
Even though DMP is made to operate third-party data, it also supports some first-party data to improve the information given.
Organize
In this step, the DMP classify the info into categories, grouping them as clusters. Clusters are a type of audience segmentation that combines customers with similar marketing sales behaviors in one file.
For example, it is possible to create a group of customers who has made most of their purchases by ad clicks, or those who spent a certain amount of money in a product or service related to yours, who has more visits in a specific category in a website that might fit your business, etc.
Activate
Now, it is crucial that the data management platform used is agnostic, which means it will be compatible with any digital platform. So, if the company wants to run a campaign for the brand in social media, websites, search engines, etc, it will be just fine. The activation itself happens when the campaign is on.
Learn
By analyzing the return over the investments made on the ads, it will be possible to understand the depth of cluster segmentation. The company will have more domain over the results acquired since the data is much more precise than any other type.
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What Can You Do With a Data Management Platform?
One of the main benefits a DMP provides is the cluster: high-detailed information about customers so you can create hyper-targeted ad campaigns, delivering more conversion rates and increasing the ROI of your company.
Using a DMP, you’ll be able to create accurate segmentation, making the proper usage of your third-party data by giving your audience the right message.
Practical Example
Imagine you run a dental clinic and want to expand your qualified leads base for a specific segment, let’s say dental implants. That is one of the most expensive procedures you have and it is not salable to any type of customer.
Typically, you would create a campaign based on people interested in dentistry or dental implants in a wide range, fitted in average age, near your clinic.
With a DMP, the depth of your segmentation reaches this: men and women, from 40 to 70 years old, who have downloaded some white papers about dental implants, researched a number of keywords that demonstrate the need for professional information and live within 5 km of the clinic.
Here are some possibilities your company can reach with this type of segmentation:
- Retargeting: easily implement personalized retargeting campaigns based on specific activities and behaviors online.
- Prospecting: integrate with third-party data sources for the acquisition of anonymous data, achieving greater precision and scale in online campaigns.
- Website optimization: use your own or third-party data to provide customized content to different consumers when they come to your page.
- Audience intelligence: cross your first-party data with other third-party to learn more about your audience and reach the people most likely to convert.
- Better ROI: use an analytics tool that centralizes online campaign performance data to determine which audience segment performed best and where to focus your efforts in the future.
- Productivity increase: eliminate the bottleneck of needing IT to reach out for your data and have all your teams able to take them out, ready to use.
DMP Benefits for Companies
So far, we have seen in order to escalate your business, having the right audience to talk to is fundamental. This is market intelligence. Your company can no longer have a vague idea of who their customer is. It is necessary to personalize and amplify to get the following benefits:
Cost-Effective Advertising Campaigns
When you have this level of audience segmentation, you can spend every dollar of your budget on better-targeted prospects. Get the return on the investment you need to.
Lower Technology Investments
To run a DMP, you won’t need an extra support. Your whole team, from customer success to follow-up sales, can easily operate the system. As we mentioned before, there is no need for IT.
First, Second, and Third-Party Data Combined
No data is left behind. Even a messy pile of customer information can turn into gold here. As this platform gathers and organizes party data, every piece of a database is important, nothing is wasted.
No Data, No Success
Regardless of the type of industry you are in, uncountable amounts of information are huddled and enter your company through different doors: billing spreadsheets, sales reports, feedback offered by different media, social networks, loss or conquest of new markets, CRM, etc.
Such a thing must be used to leverage business marketing strategies. That is the reason why it is so important to generate an efficient information collection, organization and analysis on a daily basis of a company, as DMP does.
From this, a strategy can be developed over decisions based on information, including those related to strategic and operational marketing. That is the Data-Driven Marketing.
Data-Driven Marketing
Data-Driven Marketing helps, for example, to create a guideline for campaigns using DMP clusters. Besides highlighting the features/benefits/quality/etc of a product or service, it enables a work of relevant engagement with your consumers, delivering exactly what they want.
As a result, communication is enhanced by user experience and becomes more aligned with the needs of its audience.
Strategies will be able to still cohesive and aligned even when using a larger number of channels. Marketing campaigns have been running more frequently in social networks, which is the place where interaction has a leading role.
It keeps getting more essential to own proper knowledge of the market slice you are in. Its audience and characteristics indicate the way your company should brand, advertise and sell their product.
Big Data
When we reach for the definition of Big Data, we find a true technological revolution, making more possible to qualify the results obtained. Big data is a master process of analyzing and interpreting a great volume of data stored somewhere remotely.
Information is available everywhere online in a non-confidential way. No matter how large the amount of information is, Big Data can reach and group them according to interests.
Big data can be used in several business routines. However, to use it properly, it is mandatory to have not only knowledge about the technology, but also to identify which are the touchpoints in your company that will be impacted by its implementation.
By that, it will be possible to make a more efficient allocation of resources and increase the return over the investment in those data analysis solutions. And that is how a Data Driven culture is established.
Thus, the company must act so all teams understand the importance of data integration in the definition of strategies and work based on that!
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How a DMP Can Boost Marketing and Sales Results
Marketing and sales work as the core of the data management platform. This is where it starts, through hyper-segmented audiences. One of the biggest mistakes –– and frequent too! –– of digital marketing campaigns is having an incorrect or too wide segmentation.
Besides impacting those who are not part of your true audience –– and might cause a bad reputation for you ––, there is going to be a significant waste of your marketing budget that may harm your ROI.
Every click or scroll on the screen can generate data. When your marketing strategy is aligned to DMP guidance, you hand over to sales team customers ready to spend their money.
DMP and Sales
At this stage, sales have a unified perspective over the data and better cards to play, such as real-time interactions.
This is a priority in marketing and sales now. A high-performance sales team, which are those with the upper sales amount, increase the chances of achieving their mark by real-time interactions with the customer.
But we are not talking about aggressive and unprepared approaches here. Sales’ strategy must contemplate the best ways to do it based on who is the audience. By that, the integration of the DMP with marketing and sales is crucial for higher performances.
The Main Differences Between DMP and CDP
There are a lot of similarities between Data Management Platform (DMP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP). But there are also some very specific characteristics we need to keep them well established. Here they are:
Data Collection
One of the main differences between CDP and DMP is that DMP uses cookies to track users’ movement and target marketing strategies more efficiently. DMP was developed to search for data on advertising networks.
On the other side, CDP is a technological advance that gathers customer data from different sources and use it to generate more appropriate content, email marketing or offers.
Objective
DMP was designed to create deeper segmentations for the marketing strategy. CDP focuses on improving conversion rates and customer engagement, creating a richer consumer profile with more information.
CDP is also able to capture information from different channels and devices, in an automated way.
Therefore, investing in a CDP or DMP allows you to transform your company, employing more resources and intelligence to the business, and promoting your brand to a great and higher level of reference and success in the market.
How about starting now? Arena has a Customer Data Platform solution for your company. Build your clusters, make better advertisements, and talk straight forward to the audience you need. Click here and visit Arena’s CDP page!
