The terms ‘big data’ and ‘real-time advertising’ have come to dominate the lexicon of the marketing industry. Modern marketers are increasingly aware of the benefits of a data-driven marketing strategy, in driving more engaging real-time interactions.
In reality, marketers are finding it hard to connect the dots. Seven in ten marketers have gaps in capabilities and effectiveness of their technology when it comes to creating a single view of the customer, according to Marketers Worldwide.
The result is a picture of all your data sources, from both your own first party data and third party. With the explosion in email, web, SMS, digital, mobile, and social avenues, you have to find a way to unify data from each touch point to meet growing customer expectations. Having behavioural, geographic, and demographic customer data all in one place means you can target your audience accurately and meaningfully.
The right data management platform (DMP) lets you see how your campaigns perform in real-time and can let you optimise the media buy and advertising creative on the fly. Here are three critical reasons marketers should unify all data in a singular place.
Data ownership
The excitement over the potential of programmatic advertising – using big data to deliver highly targeted communications to the most relevant audience – was demonstrated with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) issuing guidelines on how to get the most from programmatic.
Advice published by the WFA spurred many headlines focusing on issues of transparency concerning agency holding groups’ media trading. Some questioned whether this lack of transparency leads the world’s largest advertisers to completely bring all their programmatic in-house.
This message appears to be getting through to forward-thinking marketers. The WFA document contained feedback from 43 of the world’s largest spending advertisers, finding 36 percent of respondents used a Data Management Platform in 2015 compared to 20 percent in 2013, to offset any potential risks around transparency and data protection.
Eliminate fragmentation frustration
One initial headache for advertisers and publishers striving for real-time marketing lies in their data sources, as well as how they monetise it. Both advertisers and marketers increasingly look at different technology solutions to help collect data and realise its true value by centralising it in one platform.
However, there are often difficulties in this. Many organisations have historically stored data in different places, often with internal teams, agency partners, and increasingly in third party tech providers that previously worked in isolation. DMPs solve this issue around siloed data, ensuring advertisers, marketers and publishers can quickly glean actionable insights from one place.
Using a DMP as the driver behind a truly multi-channel execution
DMPs created a reputation for using cookies in display advertising for re-targeting but, in reality, their capabilities vary depending on what the organisation needs. If a brand wants to synchronise offline and online communication, then the DMP is primarily used to merge with CRM data and use persistent IDs to deliver bi-directional campaign activity.
Many companies are going ‘beyond the cookie,’ using DMPs to optimise channels other than display. These channels include email, SMS, mobile, social and programmatic TV amongst many others. This means brands not only optimise their website content according to their most valuable segments but also serve relevant, personalised content at the right time in the purchase or overall customer journey. For many marketers, the ability to do this cross-device and cross-channel is the biggest change they are most eager to see.
A data management platform is the missing piece of the puzzle. Having a DMP allows you to break silos and unify data in one place, so marketers can get a single view of their customer across the entire customer journey. A DMP lets you collect and analyse data about your customers – including behavioural, geographic and profile data – from every digital touch point in one platform.
In an era when minute-by-minute campaign reporting is possible, no brand can afford not to examine its potential.
By Omar Janabi, senior director of marketing at Mapp Digital
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