5 Reasons You Need a DMP

Posted: 18 Aug 2016 06:00 AM PDT

With more companies seeking to implement a digital marketing strategy that reaches their target audiences in more effective ways while delivering high-quality traffic, the need to incorporate a data management platform (DMP) for your website and apps has become more critical. This is the most efficient process for managing one-to-one relationships. The idea behind the DMP is that it provides a way to collect more data and intelligence on the market, audience, and competition in order to enhance these relationships and build an advantage.

How a DMP Works

A DMP takes first-party and third-party user data from numerous digital marketing channels, including your own digital properties, and aggregates it. In order to understand these relationships it is necessary to know that although the third-party data collection often involves a purchase or affiliation agreement, it provides critical information on demographics or behaviors on the sites you don’t own. There’s also second-party data, which is data that is brokered between two brands or organizations that provides better targeting for both and more opportunities.

If you simply rely on first-party data, you can benefit from its exclusivity—but you'll be missing out, to some degree, because of its limited reach. Second-party data offers some advantages in its opportunities but generally does not involve any public data. Third-party data has become increasingly taped to get involved in programmatic advertising. If you were to combine all these types of data within a DMP, you can then narrow down your target audience and sharpen your focus for messaging, communication, and engagement; so it’s more meaningful and successful.

Why Your Business Needs a DMP

If you think a DMP just manages data, then you are missing a large part of its true value and the reasons why your business needs one. Consider these five reasons why this is the way to go:

Improve your ad buying return: With leaner budgets, but more options available to reach your audience, you want to make sure you have created the campaigns and selected the spots for ad purchases that deliver the most return on investment in the form of greater response rates, higher conversion, and increased brand recognition.
Streamline data: Rather than scattering data across email, e-commerce platforms, customer loyalty channels, and social media; you can bring all that data together into one place, providing a better picture and understanding of your audience, results, and overall marketing environment. The results are more effective business decisions and a better picture of what your marketing strategy needs to look like. A DMP also lets you take in new data and fold it into your existing pool of data simply by adding tags to your website, emails, mobile apps and ads to retrieve new types of data. A DMP gives you greater control over your data and organizes it in the most effective way for you so you don’t miss any critical patterns in the information that you could use to drive more revenue.
Effectively budget marketing spend: With access to hundreds of data vendors and more intelligence about the data you have within your DMP, you will be able to more appropriately budget how much you spend on marketing and through what types of marketing vehicles. Every action and cost within your marketing budget has to be accountable and connected to a strategic objective, so a DMP provides the framework of staying on top of those results to continue working within the budget and determining what future spending will look like.
Correctly manage multiple campaigns across devices: The more campaigns and devices you add to your digital marketing strategy, the more complex and cumbersome the marketing process becomes despite the opportunity to maximize your reach. However, a DMP serves as the hub for that activity and can disseminate the necessary data and track the various messaging and devices while gathering more data from each campaign that can be studied later on. This system does the heavy lifting for you and delivers the data in a way that you can easily understand while minimizing mistakes and eliminating duplication in information and effort.
Identify new potential audience segments: A DMP often provides new ways to look at segmenting the audience, which then can call out different groups that you had not previously seen or that you knew existed. It’s robust segmentation features slice and dice the available data through rapid processing of information that a human marketer could not get through in years. Therefore, a DMP can identify new patterns and ways of looking at an audience that drills down much farther in terms of audience groups to provide a picture of what they look like and how to create messages that resonate with them.

The benefits of adding a DMP to your marketing structure are awaiting you. Download Mobile DMP: The Backbone and Brain of Successful Mobile Marketing, to help you through the process. You'll enhance your digital marketing efforts and deliver a cost-effective solution for handling and leveraging the massive amounts of data now available.