In the world of digital marketing, there’s always some new technology to use that will make life easier for marketers. As marketing automation has taken off to such extreme heights, marketers in the United States and all around the globe are now looking to the next great technology that is data management platforms (DMP).
Consumer behaviour continues to evolve as new and more powerful devices make the Internet available everywhere, such as, customers can shop in a store and use their phone to scan a barcode to check online prices for a specific product, not to mention search for customer reviews and order the product.
As the world becomes more digital marketers are forced to adjust traditional CRM strategies to incorporate new customer behaviour, including consumers jumping between and across channels though the buying cycle.
But I think if most marketers were honest to themselves, they would say that they are “doing ok” in managing this transition, but not “doing great.” However, there are new powerful technologies that can help marketers move forward more rapidly through this evolution and Data management platforms (DMPs) is one such enabling technology. According to a stat presented in the year 2015 said that, 68% of marketers believed that data management platforms (DMPs) are the key to the future of programmatic marketing, and increasing use of DMPs is proving the study had accurate predictions.
Data Management Platform v/s Demand-side Platform
In order to understand DMPs completely, we must first look at their relationship with demand-side platforms.
Demand-side platforms (DSP) purchases digital advertising through automation. These platforms can purchase digital ads, search and video ads, mobile ads, on a variety of websites. They perform these actions without any sort of human interaction. In the past, most advertising was sold through sales executives, but now DSPs have replaced them in some capacity. This makes the process of buying cheaper and faster.
Utilizing the information already in a DMP of a company, the DSP orchestrates the information and tells advertisers which available impressions on the ad exchange make the most sense for a company. The DSP might advise using one sort of ad for a certain demographic and another type of ad for another demographic.
How DMP works?
A Demand-Side Platform will orchestrate the data contained in the Data Management Platform. The DMP holds all your information and translates it in a way that marketers can successfully utilize. Unlike regular database systems that usually keep track of just names, email addresses, and addresses, among other things, a DMP also collects cookie IDs and online user behaviour.
To summarize it all up, a DMP gathers user information and translates it so your DSP can orchestrate the information and make ad purchases based on what the DMP recommends. It is also important to note that information from a DMP can be used to purchase ads from ad exchanges and networks. You are not limited to DSPs for your ad-purchasing requirements.
Collect data successfully with DMP
It all comes down to the amounts of data you gather. By orchestrating this data, your DMP will be able to better advise you on how you should target your audience on the basis of places where they hang out.
Additionally, a DMP does not only depend on your data alone. DMPs consolidate the first party and third party data to give you the most accurate recommendations possible. Third-party data includes information that the platform has already gathered for you.
Let me tell you a DMP example, consider that you’re a marketing company that wants to target a certain group of leads. You choose those leads via your first-party data using the sign-up forms they have filled out or any other type of lead-generation action the leads have completed. Now by using the third-party data, you can overlay your lead data with social media handles of each individual. That means you can now target those leads across particular social media platforms, taking out ads and targeting those leads even closer.
Furthermore, is that you can also target their friends and potentially expand your reach even further. The possibilities are endless with DMPs and as you get better at utilizing them, you’ll be able to create hundreds of highly-targeted campaigns.
Top Data Management Platforms
If you think you’re prepared to invest in a DMP, then you have many different options. All of them offer great features and will help you in better understanding what your data means and how you can utilize it. All of these platforms are also user-friendly so you won’t have to waste too much time learning to use your new software. Choosing any platform relies upon the requirements of your business, but here don’t forget to consider DMP privacy, as after GDPR & CCPA coming in, privacy-compliance has become one of the most important aspects of today’s digital world.
Here are our 3 favourite DMPs,
Adobe Audience Manager
We all know, Adobe has built some of the most universal Softwares, ranging from Photoshop to Indesign to a number of other extraordinary products. Adobe Audience Manager provides what it called 360-degree views of customers. By combining information from the first and third parties together, it helps marketers get the most in-depth view of customers possible. Audience Manager also empowers marketers to make as many segments of their audience as possible. In the end, it also advises them on how to market to those segments.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a part of the larger AWS (Amazon Web Services), a platform of Amazon that provides subscription-based cloud-computing services. Amazon Redshift, specifically, is a fast data warehouse that simplifies the data analysis process.
Amazon Redshift is efficient because it is integrated with other AWS services, like Amazon S3. It claims to deliver performance that is ten times faster than that of other DMPs. You can set up and begin utilizing your DMP within minutes, and even test out Amazon Redshift with a free two-month trial before choosing into one of their payment plans.
Oracle BlueKai
Oracle’s DMP, Oracle BlueKai vows to “turn insight into action.” The DMP offers audience data management that enables marketers to browse through their own data and develop a number of key targets for all sorts of campaigns and potential campaigns. The audience data marketplace combines marketing information collected from more than 30 professional data providers. This gives you access to over 700M anonymous customer profiles and 40,000 data attributes.
Final Take
If you step back and take in the view of what a DMP has to offer, you start to see a much larger picture than you could have truly imagined. In an era when minute-by-minute campaign reporting is possible, no organization can afford not to examine its potential.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.