DMP? What's that?
The constant and unprecedented growth of digital media has led to the rise of immense opportunity for marketers and advertisers to reach their audience in far more systematic ways. As marketers, we are constantly trying to understand who our audience is and how best we can reach them. We can never settle on creating a particular audience set today and assume that this set will hold true for the next quarter, let alone the next year. The interests and behavior of the masses keep varying and our audience set will keep having minute changes that need to be changed on a real time basis. It is close to impossible to create new audiences, ensure they are kept up to date and also run data-driven campaigns.
This is where a DMP comes into play. A DMP is a data management platform that allows you to collect data from various first, second and third party sources, organize them and then activate this data to run digital campaigns. DMPs help in converting large raw data into a usable form.
Why do I need a DMP?
They are like storage units which once fed data, continues to learn and grow this data to help increase your audience. The data that customers generate is a constantly growing and so is the potential to use this data. Almost every action that customers take while online, produces data that can be used to create and improve marketing strategies. DMPs help you organize and analyze this data to be able to get valuable insights.
One of the benefits of a data management platform is that these systems provide organizations the necessary resources to make sense of the data they have.
How does this work?
As a marketer we research and understand who our TG is and this is fed into our DMP system. We can get this data from 3 different sources:
- 1st party data: This is the data collected from our own customers. This includes data from websites, social media, search and display, or any source that we own
- 2nd party data: This is ideally someone else’s 1st party data that we can access when shared to a DMP
- 3rd party data: DMPs allow users to access pre-populated audience sets based on various criteria that we could require
DMPs also have advanced algorithms that help in identifying look alike audiences based on past campaigns and audience sets we have created. The platform analyzes behavioral traits and patterns to match the existing audience to other new profiles to increase our reach.
Once the data has been analyzed and classified into separate buckets, we can now analyze and try to understand which audience bucket serves us best for a particular campaign. For example, if we were a sports brand who sold football boots, our initial audience would be of those who have searched for studs or showcased interest in sports/ football. If we were to analyze this data to see trends and look for more insights, the options could be to bifurcate them based on what type of surface people have shown preferences for (this could be from search history, interests on social media, cookies from other e-commerce websites where they could have searched for specific studs)
The final step would be to activate this data and integrating it via our DMP system to other platforms which have open APIs. This varies from each DMP and the different platforms they allow you to integrate this data with.
This is an ongoing loop where you continue to further optimize your data based on the performance and analytics and help you grow your audience and continue to improve your reach.
Hope this helped in taking your first step towards leveraging a DMP to run your campaign!