What is a DMP? A DMP, data management platform, is the backbone of data-driven marketing and serves as a unifying platform to collect and organize your first-, second-, and third-party data.
It holds data about prospects and customers from different online and offline sources and activates them through multiple channels such as display and search.
DMPs are key to programmatic advertising — but you will often meet folks in this space who are not aware of certain features that a DMP can provide.
“Data management platform” sounds like a data warehouse. But it’s so much more than that.
Let’s go through some of the use cases, and see if your marketing team is using your DMP to the fullest.
Four use cases you should be getting from a DMP
360 degree view and customer journey
If you have a DMP but never thought of centralizing different first-, second- and third-party data and creating personalized experiences across prospect/customer journey, you are missing out.
Offline CRM data and second-party data are often overlooked, but both can be more valuable than 3rd party data.
CRM data, as one type of first-party data, without a doubt is very important.
Second-party data is the data from your partners. For example, it is very likely that a frequent flyer also books hotels.
By now you may have a question – I had all my data in Hadoop data lake before I got a DMP. Am I supposed to send all of them to my DMP?
The answer is no. Since you are already paying for the storage on Hadoop, you may only want to send over the data that could be useful for activation.
For example, if you want to target 30-50 year old men who have platinum status with a certain display ad, then you need to send age, gender and status data to your DMP.
Prospecting and lookalike modeling
Once all the data needed are collected in your DMP, you can start building audiences. Then you can activate them by connecting your DMP to different channels.
You can create not only rule-based segments, which is relatively straightforward and commonly used, but also leverage algorithmic modeling.
Lookalike modeling is a well-proven prospecting strategy that finds you new audiences who look like the group of existing customers that you select. This could be, for example, your best customers.
New prospects that the “lookalike modeling” finds will be similar to your existing best customers. Thus, you’ll enjoy a higher likelihood of conversions.
DMPs can use any data sent from any one or multiple data sources to build the model. And then they can send the lookalike modeling results to any channel to find lookalike audiences to serve ads to.
Cross-DSP frequency capping
A DSP, or demand side platform, is an automated ad buying platform.
By connecting your DMP to a DSP, you can play in the world of programmatic advertising, e.g. real-time bidding (RTB) on the ad exchanges.
How does frequency capping relate, then?
If a person has seen the same advertising banner of yours 50 times a day already but still shows no interest, you probably want to call it quits. A certain level of frequency is necessary, but too many ad impressions cause wear-out and can also be a big drain on your ad budget.
Frequency capping is not new, and the art of finding the optimal frequency could be an article of its own.
DSPs also offer frequency capping as part of their own platforms.
However, a DMP allows you to set up frequency capping across multiple DSPs, as well as other marketing channels — even the same content on your websites. This is what you really want.
Website personalization
DMPs are traditionally used for improving advertising effectiveness. Now, however, their applications have extended far beyond the world of advertising.
All the data that a DMP collects can enhance your website personalization.
For example, say you’re using Adobe Target as your website personalization tool and Adobe Audience Manager as your DMP solution.
Adobe Target can leverage the offline CRM data that you have in Adobe Audience Manager to deliver highly relevant content to your website visitors even if they had never visited your website previously.
What else should you be sure you’re getting from your DMP? Leave a comment below!
Daisy has 15 years of experience at well-known brands, top management consulting firms, and advertising agencies, and 5 years of experience heading analytics functions at various companies.