A Universal Data Marketing Platform: How to break down the silos across the data marketing stack
Even the most data-savvy marketers can become lost in a world of acronyms and data solutions
In a data-driven world, companies lose time and money through siloed data and end up delivering inefficient marketing. The average enterprise uses 20+ marketing cloud services across all elements of marketing — without any below layer or infrastructure to enable seamless operation. This leads to a number of challenges including inconsistent user journeys, poor optimisation due to a lack of reliable cross channel measurement, and data stored in silos — meaning that the opportunity to integrate AI at scale across the whole solution is lost. In short, a significant amount of marketing budget is being spent on multiple solutions that create inefficiencies and non-actionable data.
The Challenge
Research suggests that 63% of marketers that have invested in MarTech for the last three years admit that they don’t know how to use it — in many cases due to jumping onboard with the hot new trend. Currently, with the rising demand from consumers for personalised communications across different touch points, businesses are looking to implement data management solutions like Data Management Platforms (DMP) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to engage with consumers using the right message at the right time and to deliver personalisation. But the bigger challenges are — one, how to ensure they are collecting the right form of data, two, segmenting it into a better use case for a business and three, the expertise required for building an ROI model by utilising these datasets.
What is a DMP and what is a CDP?
A DMP enables marketers to serve targeted ads programmatically using anonymous customer data, at scale and in-real-time.
A CDP creates detailed, identifiable customer profiles for improving ad targeting, personalisation, segmentation, loyalty programs, and the entire customer journey — at a high level of accuracy and precision.
The aim of the CDP is to bring together all customer data and sync the data together into unified customer profiles. So a marketer can easily work with it. There has been a lot of talk about platforms or solutions that provide a ‘Single Customer View’ but in reality there hasn’t been one platform type out there that has the potential to bring together all the data and at the same time properly make it useful.
It is easy to confuse a DMP with a CDP. DMPs were designed to serve ads and enable retargeting using cookies. They focus more on anonymous segments and categories than single customers. In a DMP, much of the info is anonymous and typically expires after 90 days (the cookie average lifetime).
The CDP creates a persistent customer profile. That means it stores the data and keeps the history. Then by combining it with all the data about your customers comes out with a single record.
DMPs were designed to target (and especially retarget) anonymous users for advertising, whereas CDPs create a database of your identified customers to use for more than only advertising.
Generally, those that have opted for a CDP also desire the audience activation functions of a data management platform (DMP). For those who have opted for a DMP, what they are lacking is the insight – the unified customer view – of a CDP.
The solution: a Universal Data Marketing Platform
So what is the solution?
For each business there are unique requirements and challenges. A solution is required that allows the organisations’ data to be communicated like a central nervous system, one universal data platform — no silos, that caters to ALL of the brand’s data marketing needs, negating the need for more than one data marketing system. As an example, for particular sectors (e.g. Retail, Telecoms, Media) there is a need to manage large amounts of ‘real-time’ data (navigation, campaign etc.) at the same time as ‘cold’ CRM data.
At mediarithmics, we believe that marketers should not simply choose either a CDP or a DMP, but a platform which provides the best functionality of both including:
- 360 degree agnostic view of users (whatever their ids), consent management, privacy and traceability
- High-volume in real time of heterogeneous data, CRM interactions
- Heterogeneous data + data alliance of 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data
- CRM in real time for managing prospects and clients
- Bespoke algorithms which operate in real time
Our own Universal Data Marketing Platform breaks down the silos and gives marketers control over their data. By providing future-proof technological infrastructure, we are able to ensure delivery of all of a brands data marketing use cases — for today and tomorrow.
To find out more about how mediarithmics is the benchmark data-marketing infrastructure for major brands and how to make an investment in a platform that fully integrates all marketing functions please visit www.mediarithmics.com.