Care factors for a healthy DMP program – Part III – Experience

In continuation of the Care factors for a healthy DMP program – Part I – Overview article, I would like to explain the data related care factors in this article.

Marketing Alignment

Instead of calling it Data Management Platform, I prefer to call DMP as Data for Marketing Platform. An audience in DMP is useless, it is the DMP activated audience in marketing channels which brings business value. Ensure that marketing teams are present in all C and I columns of DMP RACI matrix, and should also be Approver for audience strategy phase of the project. Consult the marketing teams on potential use cases, audience journey, audience lifespan, disqualification triggers and performance measurement. Not all your marketing teams may start using DMP in first phase so have a use case plan to start with one channel, (say) paid, show results with suppression or budget efficiency, then connect to onsite, show improvement in funnel based on connected campaigns, bring in outbound, start running sophisticated journey personalisation like lead nurturing to conversion, and so on.

Audience performance

Value realisation is a big buzzword currently in many organisations, and for right reasons. DMP is generally a more expensive product compared to your Analytics or CRO tools, but not many organisations can quantify the value from their DMP investment. DMP installation is not value to business. Since internal teams do not focus to quantify the incremental value that DMP audience driven personalisation campaigns deliver, DMP generally fails to get the love and care of senior stakeholders. There are many examples in the industry where DMP is still a shelf ware many years after initial build and MVP use cases. Plan to measure DMP audience’s performance and in turn, refine audience definitions to improve performance.