The key to a successful digital marketing strategy is to be able to establish a one-to-one relationship with everyone within your target audience. Just a few short years ago, this approach was the holy grail of marketing. But, nowadays this approach has become very possible and available for enterprises that are willing to invest in such technology. These magical, sophisticated solutions available in the world to achieve these goals are called DMPs (or Data Management Platforms). Let’s have a look at the basics:
What is a DMP?
A DMP collects and aggregates both first-party data (from your own digital properties) and third-party data (demographics or interest-based pools of users based on certain behaviours on other sites). Once the relevant data is gathered, it is analyzed, organized and then, most importantly made available to other platforms like DSPs (Demand Side Platforms), SSPs (Supply Side Platforms), and ad exchanges. This turns the collected data into segments that allow the creation of targeted advertising and customized content within the advertisers’ online assets. Think of it as the cardiovascular system in advertising technology; it brings many different platforms together in a balanced way – a system that allows marketers to turn their audience data into a powerful tool to connect with them in a way that is unique to each user.
Why take advantage of DMPs?
Advertising technology (or AdTech) is here to stay. It’s not a sideshow if you do business on the web, it’s the whole game as dramatically demonstrated by Google’s business model alone. These days, advertisers acquire media across a wide range of different sites and through an equally wide range of providers that include DSPs, ad networks, and more. The whole reason these technologies exist is to understand customer information as best as possible.
This goal is achieved through DMPs bringing all that information together in a centralized database that allows you to make the correct decisions about your advertising. To give a simple example, let’s say you’re in the financial business. It would seem natural to spend some budget on advertising your products and services on particularly popular financial websites in order to reach an audience of people interested in finance. With a DMP in place – if set up correctly, it will get you a superior audience – one that is even more refined in the market you want to attract, by examining user behaviours across the wider internet.
Who needs a DMP?
Anybody who is doing business on the web can benefit from a DMP. The primary users thus far are publishers, marketing agencies and many large enterprises with massive amounts of data collected on a frequent basis.
For publishers, a DMP allows for managing audience data collected from a variety of websites so that their advertising campaigns across the sites are data-driven and fine-tuned to find the right audience, essentially maximizing the number of clicks every ad gets. In this way, your own first-party data (the data you collect yourself) can be combined with data collected by other parties.
Marketers and marketing agencies use DMPs so that they can pinpoint and sort out the deepest possible audiences in order to gain a deeper understanding of behaviour and preferences. Once you understand how your best existing clients or prospects behave, this same information will allow you to identify other potential customers who – by showing a similar behaviour – could be a perfect fit for your products and services.
DMP is Knowledge.
Knowledge is Power.
Power is…?
