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As a “Marketer”, you are constantly identifying new needs or tools that are supposed to help you achieve your goals. You identify features, then products that, apparently, integrate them.
The trend subject of the moment? It has not escaped you, everyone is talking about it: the Data Management Platform (DMP). This platform allows you to recover, centralize, manage and activate the data related to your prospects and client. You stay then, again and again, focused on the features, guided by the impatience to test them: Which segments can you create with all your data? By the way what data to choose? How to reconcile them? Etc.
Are you sure you took the problem in a good way? Are there no other upstream issues?
Imagine planning your vacations, you do not start your journey by looking for hotels according to their amenities … You need to know what you need or want for these holidays. You have in mind questions of this type: “Do I want to relax? Immerse myself in a culture? Sports activities? “. You then select destinations and, unless you have an unlimited budget, you refine the destinations according to your means. You define your flight itinerary, the stages of your stay then, finally you seek the appropriate hotel.
Is there a path like this that leads to DMP?
Your DMP trip, destination ROI!
Go back to the company’s point of view. What is the purpose of my business? The growth. What is the goal of my marketing department? Draw this growth upwards, by looking for powerful channels.
Remember your return home after your first trip abroad. It only served to fuel your desire for experiences. You wanted more. More adventures, more change of scenery.
It was the same after your first actions of traffic acquisition, surely via the Search channel. You wanted more: more traffic, more sales, more conversions, more turnover, more ROI. You have tried other marketing acquisition experiences and tested new channels: display, affiliation, retargeting, RTB, emailing …
You also have tested new partners, which you multiplied by channel: one became two, two became three, and so on. You wanted to challenge your partners to keep only the best performers. Three have become two again. But how did you proceed? You have launched campaigns
Because gathering your CRM and online data, creating segments and activating them will only make sense when you launch campaigns. It is a fact, with the DMP, you start a journey that will allow you to get more ROI on your channels and fulfill the mission of your marketing department.
This DMP trip will go through campaigns (or use cases). Using a DMP is a continuous testing & learning process. So, not only few campaigns will launch, but a lot.
A first flight will take off at the end of your installation with a first wave of use cases. A second will start quickly after making the decision to cut some use cases, even optimizing others and launch new ones. Your cruising pace will be on, the journey to more growth will be on track.
But does your campaign have a driver to take you to the ROI destination? Remember your frustration on your last trip when you learned that the pilots were (still) on strike!
You now understand it, the DMP trip needs steering. It will go through the analyzing the performance of your campaigns brick. One of the main thrusts of tomorrow’s DMP will be analysis, as Martin Kihn [1] pointed out at the 2017 Gartner Digital Marketing Conference.
More than a trip, a customer journey
The DMP trip will make you see things differently. You will think people-based, to the individual. Your marketing strategy will evolve to a customization of the relationship between your brand and the individuals over the entire purchase process (customer journey), but not only. This new approach will change the analysis of the performance of your campaigns.
A new trip is coming, the evolution of your attribution towards a real attribution strategy. This will seek to value the investments made to customize the relationship on the customer journey. The question you will have to ask yourself is whether or not these two trips are ultimately just one. And this question will generate others: can I manage this brick with my existing solutions? Do they have the expertise to help me and cover the project as a whole? How will I finally structure my technological ecosystem and allocate my investments?
MAR TECH give you wings
DMP and Attribution constitute a common journey, the journey of a Mar Tech base towards a clear destination: optimize the ROI on your Ad Tech activities (DSP, Trading Desk …).
It is a long trip that is necessary, because structuring the technological ecosystem of your company in a sustainable way. It is also a trip to build. It will allow your marketing department to find the best partners to achieve this growth.
It will bring you a solid, independent structure of your Ad Tech tools. Since this base does not use media buying, you will be neutral in judging the results of your campaigns on performance and media expertise. If by misfortune an Ad Tech partner did not give you satisfaction, you would not question your Mar Tech base on specific criteria to this partner: technology, optimization of its own overall ROI, long-term evaluation. You will thus perpetuate your data, the efforts made to reconcile them and avoid starting from scratch with each disappointment.
The conditions will be gathered for your marketing teams to find:
- New channels and partners, real growth drivers
- Stability with a solid block of reunited and segmented data
- Flexibility through the ability to enable or disable a partner easily
- Transparency, being able to evaluate their media campaigns without bias
- Simplicity thanks to a unique solution
Think about the technological ecosystem and how to structure it, think about long-term growth and how you are going to achieve it.
Think about your far-off trips, you do not leave just a week on the other side of the world, you seek to optimize the cost of your plane ticket by maximizing the time on the location.
If you think DMP, you could only spend a week there. Think Mar Tech.
[1] Research VP – Cabinet d’études Gartner
