Using a Data Management Platform, or DMP, is essential for managing and marketing your business, having a one-stop shop for every single piece of data is just the start of the advantages when it comes to using a DMP. If you’re scaling your business and using various sources such as excel or your CRM to house data, then, unfortunately, you’re not segmenting or marketing as efficiently as you could be.
Download the complete guide to owning and managing a DMP with our free ebook download
So what is a DMP? Put simply, a DMP is a platform designed to import, house and publish the richest of all rich data, segmented to the most granular level you deem fit. Let’s look at those 3 facets in a bit more detail:
- Importing Data – Importing or ingesting data can be achieved from any source in your business. Whether it’s current customer databases that live inside the CRM or simply visits to various sections of the website. Once you have ingested the data into your Data Management Platform, the real fun begins in terms of segmentation and gathering rich audience pools
- Housing Data – Once you have ingested your data, it’s then up to you how granular you get. A DMP can tell you lots of information about a website visitor when they get to the site, i.e. sex, age bracket, location, page visited, whether they made a purchase (if you tagged that part of the site) and this is only the start. Let’s say you have tagged up the site to tell the DMP what product a customer purchased, over time you can start to create these rich audiences allowing you to make more informed decisions on your marketing efforts. E.g, males aged between 18-24 in Sydney regularly buy beanie hats, therefore let’s narrow down our targeting for that particular product. Once you have your ‘rich’ audience that’s when you can start to push to all of your marketing channels. “I can do that anyway now with custom audiences” I hear you say, of course, so let’s get into the publishing aspect of a DMP…
- Publishing Data – Otherwise known as ‘pushing’ data out of the DMP and into your marketing channels. Now, Facebook and other ad platforms allow you upload customer lists directly via a CSV file, depending on how nimble your infrastructure is, this can be a time-consuming effort, therefore selecting the data directly from the DMP and pushing to Adwords, Facebook, DBM, etc becomes more of a seamless and less time-consuming event. Depending on the size of the list, an audience data segment can be live on a platform within seconds. Additionally, retargeting those visits that are not customers becomes a heck of a lot more simple. What’s more, a Data Management Platform will allow you to create quality ‘lookalike’ audiences from the millions of data points available, meaning you can find more of those customers who are the most profitable.
Managing a DMP does not come easy, and it’s not a case of switching it on and hoping for the best, the art of tagging the website can be arduous but once it’s done you’ll soon find the fruits of your labour. Keeping your data up to date is a task it itself, keeping clean and consistent data is the key to DMP success.
For more information about DMP best practice and the core pillars of a data management platform, download our complete guide here