The Emergence of MarTech : DMP

Marketing is quickly moving away from being just a great creative idea, riding on top of a media vehicle to reach the consumer. Technology now enables targeting purposeful communication, at an appropriate time, over a specific channel, to the end consumer…making the communication relevant to the consumer, as also resulting in better ROI on the marketing spends for the brand. 

We can engage with “known” users using email / SMS / Mobile push / Web push etc. However there are a whole bunch of people who visit our website and leave their footprints behind. They appear just as a statistics in our Google Analytics. How do we engage with these unknown users and reach out to them with relevant messaging ?\

Data-management-platforms (or DMPs) is an important martech solution that helps optimise digital media spends and enables in monetising the footprints of the website visitor in very interesting ways.

Let us look at some interesting ways in which DMP can be used :

·       Frequency Capping: As a digital marketeer, if I want to limit the number of times (frequency) my advertisement gets shown to the same consumer, I can do this at the publishers end. However at a given time, as a brand, I may be running my campaign across multiple publishers (or ad-networks). How do I then limit the number of times an individual sees my ad across all these multiple publishers and ad-networks ? DMP allows a brand to do this frequency capping across multiple ad-networks and publishers, thus generating huge savings by avoiding wastage or over-exposure.

·       Leveraging Website Data : Tons of visitors visit our website on a daily basis.  DMP enables us to tag every browser that visits our website, and using cookies record information as to which browsers, for example, spent a lot of time on the website or visited at least 4-5 pages or engaged with lot of content on the website. These would typically be the kind of visitors who are most likely to buy my product. Once I can generate a cookie pool of these actively engaged browsers, I can use this cookie pool to create a look-alike audience on some other platform (example Facebook). This look-alike audience (by definition) is likely to exhibit similar behavior to the people who visited my website and thus my most likely prospects. Thus I have suddenly been able to increase the audience size that I can target for my products and services.

·       Engaging with visitors from other websites : Imagine a use-case, where I am retailer of high value fashion wear.  Browsers which visit fashion magazines (say like Vogue) become a target audience for me. Using DMP I can access these specific browsers that visit the Vogue site, and then can target specific communication to these browsers on some other publisher platform or again create a look-alike audience.

·       Monetising my website data : Imagine I am a manufacturer of furniture. However my sales happen via my channel partners (either online or offline). Now if there are web visitors (browsers) who are spending time on my site looking up a specific type of furniture (which helps me identify the browser as a serious browser and also understand the exact requirement better), I can share this browser cookie with one of my channel partners, who is most likely to be able to meet the need of this visitor (either basis product range or geography etc).  And then this channel partner in turn can find a way to target this browser with specific offers, creating most optimal chance of generating a sale.

Thus, as we see from some of the above examples, a martech platform like DMP can create immense value for the brand in terms of reaching out to unknown customer with relevant messaging.  It is little wonder that martech is moving to the centre of marketing communication.

Hareesh Tibrewala is Joint CEO of Mirum India. Mirum India is a Gold Consulting Partner for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Solutions.