It doesn’t matter your size, industry, or revenue – all marketers want to make the most of audience information and data to support relevant communications and offers. Executing on this strategic thinking starts with a solid data management strategy.
A data management platform (DMP) offers marketers a boost in executing on the goal of making the best use of the data that exists. A DMP helps marketers create actionable, unified customer profiles and segment audiences for more personalised engagement. But before introducing a DMP, it’s critical to understand your organisation’s readiness, maturity, and the overall business implications of its potential impact.
If uncovering the value in data seems daunting to your team and/or organisation, you’re not alone. Challenge is imminent. Whether you’re looking to get started with a data management strategy from scratch, or considering the implementation of a data management platform.
Questions that need to be addressed include:
1. How mature is your organisation?
The maturity of an organisation with regard to DMP generally refers to digital and social channels. Think of digital channels as display, mobile and video banner advertising, embedded into desktop and mobile websites and mobile apps. Think of social channels as paid advertising directly with platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WeChat or advertising on a brand’s owned social pages.
Now consider who is creating the strategy for these channels and how does this strategy link with more traditional channels such as email, SMS, push, outbound telemarketing or even direct mail. Also consider who in your organisation or externally is creating the campaigns and executing them.
A mature organisation takes a holistic approach and tries to ensure that data is synchronised between all channels to simplify the marketing and advertising technology stack, and ultimately having an orchestrated marketing program that adapts to each customer’s purchase path.
2. What do your customers need or expect?
Customers expect an organisation to understand their needs and wants. The reality is that this can be quite difficult to understand and then action. On the flipside, customers will deal with inconsistencies to a point especially if they see an organisation is changing for the better.
Marketing unsubscribes and engagement will signal what customers like and don’t like about your brand. Knowing what your customers need and expect should flow into a consistent brand message and be developed into a personalised customer experience strategy.
3. What are your internal challenges and how will change happen?
Larger organisations are usually faced with internal challenges that are concerned with the way teams are structured and budgets allocated. This can include how to work well with external agencies and asking what resourcing do I need? A DMP will take away some IT and data management tasks whilst at the same time introduce new functionality. Ultimately skills will change and need to evolve.
4. What are the implications of DMP on data security and privacy?
A DMP should be seen as a bubble around an organisation’s assets; protecting the flow of data in and data out to only that which is controlled. The DMP itself should not contain any personally identifiable information (PII) in readable text. It should only hold Identifiers that have been scrambled for security such as a hashed email address.
In these ways, the DMP is actually secure and, when correctly implemented, private to the organisation. DMPs with extended functionality to protect a user’s privacy in the internet is also an important aspect. Look out for DMPs that honour industry opt-outs or do not track indicators. Even better, if a DMP has its own opt-out system for transparency to end users.
5. What are the implications for hiring, governance, and strategy?
It’s important that organisations are aware of the changes that implementing a digital management initiative and DMP will likely lead to throughout the company, and to accept them before the process even begins.
At the very least, it will change how you organise data, but changes will also touch how you manage your relationship with your customer and brand experience through each channel and touch point in the buying process, as well as how you work with stakeholders throughout your organisation. Your internal processes may also change to ensure the best data flows through your DMP, eradicating data silos and ensuring marketing and data strategies are intertwined. In fact, a DMP will shape how data is used throughout the organisation
6. What are your organisational goals and targets?
Having the right goals and targets will be integral to your data management success and how you use your DMP once it’s in place, so it’s important that companies set these early and revisit them often. Create a map of all the systems and processes, and understand where efficiencies are coming from and where you expect business growth to emerge. Those goals—as long as they remain realistic—will become an asset in getting ultimate value out of your DMP, and will evolve as the program matures, with new benchmarks based on ongoing results.
7. How will your DMP impact marketing maturity?
The first insight a DMP provides is visibility of visitors to sites and apps. These insights are not only derived from an organisation’s own data but from third party data. This richness of information can inform segmentation, audience insights and campaign briefs allowing users to create and execute much more sophisticated and targeted campaigns.
8. Is a DMP the right solution for your company’s data needs?
This question for the marketer can be clouded by overlapping functionality from point solutions, ad-tech and agencies and equally by the silos each technology and resource creates. Cutting through this challenge can take time but is ultimately rewarding.