And, Just Because You Have ‘Big Data’ is Not One of The Reasons to Get a DMP
Wondering where I’m going with this post because I said having Big Data is not one of the reasons to get a Data Management Platform (or DMP)? Read on …
The term Big Data is now like consultant — it means different things to different. { I’m in that group of folks that uses the term big data to describe our company … so, guilty as charged }. During a number of our meetings, the topics of data almost always comes up, whether it is about clean, dirty, big, small, or no data.
So, I thought in this post, I’d write about what a data management platform is and why many companies are moving from thinking about big data to data management.
Before I go much further, let me provide a brief description about what a data management platform is. To provide a perspective: a DMP is a system of processes and technologies that manages (or normalizes) your data to allow the business user to extract value / information easily from that aggregated data set.
Said another way: a DMP allows you to actually get your job as a marketer done (whether that is finding an insight, generating a report, building a model or executing a campaign).
How do you know your company needs a DMP? Here are the top five ways { Letterman countdown style }:
# 5 … You’ve Got More than 1 Data Source that is Updated Frequently — AT&T has Big Data because it has records about millions of us and every one of our calls logged … but so does MOOYAH Burgers (a fast-growing restaurant chain based right here in Dallas where we’re located). An important trait about the data, though, is that the information is updated frequently creating a need to continually process & normalize the data.
I’ve yet to come across a business that only has 1 data source … this particular reason means there are lots of companies out there that need DMPs.
# 4 … Your Data is Sitting With More Than 1 Vendor — Heard of the story from a marketing colleague where they say, “Well, I have to wait for agency X or company Y to give me a flat file so I can run my analysis”? Well, if you have more than 1 vendor you work with that produces data for you { think agency, social media platform, media buying, email operations, etc. } then maintaining a centralized data management platform is a strategic imperative to both ensure you have data that is well-connected but that you can also readily enable cross-channel or cross-data source analysis.
# 3 … You Have Marketing Operations that Rely on “Real-Time” Customer Data — Basically, if you have a need for ‘production analytics’, the customer data management platform ensures that your data sources are loaded, processed, and normalized. The normalized data can then be readily used for analysis, reporting, or modeling to serve as inputs for a variety of activities & functions.
Example of marketing activities that require product analytics include:
> 1:1 mobile app recommendations
> Populating executive dashboards
> Churn or attrition modeling
> Customer life cycle behavioral triggers
# 2 … You are Focused on Marketing Objectives that Drive Revenue, Engagement, and Loyalty — { This would be our # 1 except that I have an even better # 1 in our top five reasons countdown. } There are so many different data sources, lots of different tools, and more data than you can have easily tied up into a pretty little package.
The problem is, as marketers we’re spending more & more of our time getting information ready for decision making and NOT enough time evaluating the data for decision making. Consequently, our role as a marketer is changing rapidly to spend valuable resources on data vs traditional marketing tactics.
Implementing a robust customer data management platform allows marketers to focus on marketing again.
# 1 … You’re a Data Rock Star and Don’t Have a Programming / Analytics or Related Degree — You are the go to person in your team just because you were able to build that awesome analysis { in Excel } by mashing together those 3 data sets about the product, customer, and behaviors. Everyone else is in awe and you were up for multiple nights in a row cleaning and doing all of those Lookups! { You know who you are! }
Going back to # 2 above, while you are a rock star for trudging through the data and likely getting hi-fives for having a reputation of getting things done, how much of a bigger rock star would you be if you were able to spend time devising that new campaign that grew engagement 15% or innovating on an existing promotional offer set, reducing costs 10%?
It’s time for that DMP.
Have any other reasons you’d add to the list? Drop me a comment below.
