Marketers: Overcome these 4 challenges with a data management platform

At its core, marketing is about connecting with people—the right people, with the right message, in the right time and place. It’s an elegant, easy-to-communicate objective. The trouble is that marketers never seem to have the reach they need to meet it. And even if they do have that reach, matching the right message to the right person presents its own challenges.

A data management platform (DMP) collects, organizes, and activates audience data from multiple sources, using it to target and personalize marketing and advertising. A DMP can help marketers define and reach audiences and match relevant messages with appropriate prospects. Objective: met. 

Here are four persistent challenges a DMP can help marketers overcome

1. Getting the most value from data

For many organizations, there’s no shortage of customer data. But if marketers can’t see all the data in one place, it’s difficult to interpret accurately and take action as a result. So, data that could help alleviate marketers’ headaches ends up creating more of them.  

A data management platform can connect data from different sources, channels, and platforms to create a single customer view. The DMP allows marketers to analyze each data point in the context of the complete buyer journey, deriving concrete insights they can use to influence audience behavior—instead of just monitoring it. By unifying data, a DMP can be the key to delivering consistent customer experiences everywhere audiences choose to engage.

2. Stewarding customer data responsibly

Customers are increasingly aware that marketers collect and use their data, and data breaches can seriously impact trust in brands. According to McKinsey, 87% of customers won’t do business with a brand if they have concerns about its data security practices. 

In addition to maximizing your data’s impact, a DMP can minimize data leakages. By collecting all audience data in a central repository, a DMP secures access and makes it easier to monitor how data is used—and by whom. Using a DMP is a smart move for companies that care about keeping data safe.

3. Improving reach, response rates, and conversion

Every interaction from an audience member is a clue about how best to engage them—or push them away. But without consistent visibility into customer interactions, marketers may miss opportunities to engage or problems that need to be corrected.

By unifying customer data, a DMP helps you discern behavior patterns—positive or negative—and how to respond to them. 

4. Demonstrating marketing return on investment

Marketing and advertising ROI is notoriously difficult to quantify. According to Forrester, 71% of B2C marketing executives anticipate that demonstrating the value of marketing to their CEO, CFO, and board of directors will be “very challenging” during the upcoming year. This is partially because marketing activities drive direct and indirect audience engagement that’s hard to track— without a data management platform, that is.

A DMP can take in data from known and anonymous audiences, creating a clear picture of engagements and conversions driven by marketing.

Get started with a data management platform.

Maximize your data’s impact to help you manage, optimize, and prove campaign performance and retain customer trust in the years ahead.

• Learn about Oracle’s BlueKai Data Management Platform.
• Read about implementing a DMP to understand and multiply your audience.