How To Make Your Marketing Data Work Harder
Last week I covered the value of using remarketing and RLSAs to capture leads from previous website visitors. This week, we’ll cover analyzing data to help increase accuracy of those two and all your online advertising.
Unless you’re someone who prefers doing everything by gut instinct or wild hunches, all of your digital marketing is driven by analytics and data. Lots and lots of data.
Lots of it.
Demographics. Customer segmentation. Online behavior. Buying habits. Preferences. Needs. Wants. Desires.
All of that tantalizing raw data about your potential and existing customers is buried deep in your system waiting to be unleashed.
Unlocking the power of your data
But how can you unlock the power of your complex data to run razor-sharp campaigns to the right audience at the right time with relevant and personal messages that will engage key audiences — and track your campaign performance?
There are standard analytics tools on the market, but most don’t give you the control and foresight you want.
That’s why you should look at a Data Management Platform (DMP).
A DMP is software that absorbs, integrates, analyzes, and manages large sets of structured and unstructured data. They’re designed to store any kind of data, but marketers are employing DMPs to increase digital advertising efficiency and ROI.
They use them to not only manage cookie IDs, audience demographics, and other vital statistics, but also analyze that data so they can customize online ads for specific targets.
DMPs and DSPs: Working together to ensure ad success
Don’t confuse data management platforms with a demand-side platform (DSP).
A DSP is software digital advertisers use to automatically purchase and manage display, video, mobile, and search ads. DSPs and DMPs are two different platforms that work in tandem to kick your advertising strategy to the next level.
Depending on the manufacturer, DMPs can analyze your first-party user data (both online and offline), and it can incorporate third-party data into the mix. That means they can target ads based on your own audience data and find new potential customers by identifying “look-alikes” with similar demographics or behaviors.
This enables marketers to assemble audience segments based on a wide range of criteria. DMPs can also help you create relevant messages that resonate with each segment and make sure your ads appear at the right moments and locations.
DMPs send those audience segments and messages to the DSP, which uses it for targeting specific audiences. The DMPs then continue tracking campaign performance and feed the analytical data back to the DSP to refine and optimize ongoing campaigns even more.
Data-driven marketing vs. shots in the dark
To sum up, DMPs enable more accurate data-driven marketing by helping you tightly monitor and optimize segmentation. Better targeted campaigns help improve response rates and conversions.
You can manage multiple campaigns throughout different ad networks and publishers. And you can increase scalability and tailor messages to help retargeting, RLSAs, and contextual advertising.
Finally, DMPs can keep advertising costs on budget and improve ROI by helping you pinpoint your exact audiences rather than taking shots in the dark at large, unqualified groups.
With the increase and (seemingly daily) advancements in marketing technology, and the constant influx of huge amounts of data, you need technology that helps understand customer information and manages your digital advertising activity across the internet.
To stay ahead of your competitors, a DMP may be the key.
But first you need the data to fill it. We’re here to help you do that. Contact us today.
Our digital marketing team will work with you to create the right strategy and campaigns to generate the audience information you need to succeed.
