DMP – The Devil is in the Data

By: Dhruva Shetty, Head of Marketing, Vizury

Marketing today is all about customer data. Ten years ago, a brand could have probably gotten away with a TV ad and a print campaign to reach out to their customers. It’s not that simple anymore. The customer comes into contact with a brand through multiple online and offline touch points which have evolved over time – website, email, display ads, social media, sms, mobile app, store, call center and much more.

This means that marketing cannot be shooting in the dark anymore. No company can be effective without mining customer data. Any decent sized organization today will have a data warehouse which stores customer data. What does a data warehouse do for you?

 It helps you gather data

 Cleanse it, and

 Store in a single platform for enterprise wide analysis

While that is a good start, the bigger question remains – is it enough to power your marketing?

No, it isn’t.

Now, imagine this for a moment. What if you were able to predict what your customer is going to buy next?  What if you were able to remind your customer that he or she forgot to buy something this week which they buy every week?

It sounds magical, but it’s pretty much just math – the devil is in the ‘data’. A data warehouse isn’t going to help you do this. A data warehouse is more akin to a shelf for data. It
will need employees to process the data and make something useful out of it. To gain insights, data scientists will have to sit with the data in the data warehouse. Several more employees will then have to plan and execute marketing campaigns based upon those insights. To take your marketing to the next level, what you need is a DMP – a Data Management Platform. The two sound similar but they are a long way from that. A DMP is the tool capable of helping you unleash the potential of big data.

Why is DMP the answer? How is it better than a data warehouse? Let’s dig a little deeper.

1. Data

A data warehouse helps you gather data from various sources. Aggregating data and storing it in one place in a format that can be easily searched and accessed is the objective of a data warehouse. But it ends there. The data still remains in its raw form and a data warehouse cannot really present this to you with a unified view in its true sense.

A DMP gives you a unified view of the customer. It gathers fragmented customer data from
various online and offline sources, overlays them and gives you a single unified view of a
customer – in terms of who is he, what does he like, what has he bought, how frequently does he visit your website, has he bought from your offline store as well, when was the last time he did and so on to the extent of, what could he possibly looking to buy next.

2. Insights

A data warehouse cleanses and organizes data. But removing redundancies in the data and
shelving it neatly can only take you so far. Data needs to be cross-linked between sources and algorithms for predictive analytics must be employed for accurate estimation.

A DMP gives you actionable insights for your marketing with predictive analytics. It recognizes customer behavioral patterns and tells you what products they are looking for, on which device do they search / buy products and at what time are they most prone to making purchases.

3. Marketing

A data warehouse makes data available in a single platform for enterprise wide analysis. But what next? Understanding and actioning these insights across various marketing channels requires additional manpower.

A DMP helps you personalize marketing across channels. It will enable you to target the right customer with relevant messaging on the right channel at the right time. You can reach your customer through email, website, social media, sms, push notifications, app or any other channel you can think of.

As a brand, you need to be able to make the best use of your data to maximize ROI on your marketing spend. A DMP does just that for you. A data warehouse is only the beginning. In fact, for many, it’s an encumbrance, because it really has no value unless you derive meaning out of it. It’s the classic age-old economics lesson my professor once taught me. To say that India is a nation of 1.3 billion people is data.

To say that India’s population density is lesser than Netherlands . . . well, that’s an insight.