5 questions to ask yourself before buying a Data Management Platform

In the last cou­ple of years, Data Man­age­ment Plat­form (DMP) has become the hottest dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing buzzword.

Every CMO and CDO has a plan to improve dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing effi­cien­cy and syn­chro­nize every touch point of the cus­tomer jour­ney : dis­play, search, social, sites, e‑mails.

DMP is the new tool that reach­es the holy grail of mar­ket­ing; to aggre­gate every avail­able bit of data and stitch them to a unique user. Lever­ag­ing a DMP seems obvi­ous and a “neces­si­ty in the age of the cus­tomer”. Ask­ing your­self the right ques­tions before start­ing such a key project will help you avoid the com­mon fatal errors.

Here are the 5 steps which will help you start craft­ing the frame­work of a suc­cess­ful DMP implementation.

1. Why do I need a Data Man­age­ment Platform ?

This ques­tion might sound weird since almost any orga­ni­za­tion should lever­age a Data Man­age­ment Plat­form (DMP).

How­ev­er, this is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant ques­tion you’ll have to answer.
By answer­ing it, you’ll find out quick­ly the real chal­lenges for your orga­ni­za­tion and you’ll ensure that your team goes through a prop­er project assessment.

Start­ing to imple­ment a DMP with­out dig­ging into the details is the most com­mon mis­take I’ve seen over the past few years and it often leads to irrel­e­vant and painful projects. Imple­ment­ing a DMP will def­i­nite­ly mod­i­fy the way you think and col­lab­o­rate inside and out­side of your orga­ni­za­tion and will change the par­a­digm of your whole brand ecosys­tem : work­flows, tech­nol­o­gy, agen­cies, part­ners, media …

2. Which ‘use cas­es’ do I want to achieve ?

Use cas­es are the illus­tra­tion of the start­ing point and the way a DMP will dri­ve val­ue for your busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion. Imag­in­ing detailed use cas­es and val­i­dat­ing them will help you keep your project on the right tracks. They will enable you to build a frame­work that will help your dif­fer­ent teams, your agen­cies and part­ners to ramp up the learn­ing curve. There is no lin­ear­i­ty in such projects. All your uses cas­es will be test­ed, kept or dropped then replaced by new ones in a very iter­a­tive process made of con­tin­u­ous short test­ing cycles dri­ven by a fail­ure-tol­er­ant mindset.

3. What is the mea­sure­ment framework ?

As for any oth­er project, mea­sure­ment is a basic require­ment. After hav­ing defined the use cas­es and their busi­ness goals, mea­sure­ment is the log­i­cal next step that will make you think about how you are going to assess suc­cess and fail­ure. Your Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tors (KPIs) must be spe­cif­ic to your indus­try and mean­ing­ful for your orga­ni­za­tion. They will be dif­fer­ent for each chan­nel and relat­ed to your area of focus: media opti­miza­tion (display,search, social), site per­son­al­iza­tion, e‑mails or any com­bi­na­tion of these 3 options.

4. What will be the impact for my organization ?

Aggre­gat­ing any source of data and lever­ag­ing it to improve dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing effi­cien­cy is a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty for any brand. It is also a real chal­lenge when it comes to putting the data togeth­er, irre­spec­tive of the depart­ment or busi­ness unit which ‘owns’ that part of the company’s knowl­edge. It requires a true col­lab­o­ra­tive work­flow and a plat­form approach, break­ing silos and set­ting a new way of work­ing between teams.

5. Am I ready to change the way we’re working ?

This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant ques­tion and is not option­al. Chang­ing the way you’re work­ing is pre­cise­ly what makes the dif­fer­ence between win­ning com­pa­nies and the rest of the mar­ket. Silos, bar­ri­ers, ver­ti­cal orga­ni­za­tion and absence of shared goals will pre­vent your brand ful­ly lever­ag­ing a DMP and unleash­ing data assets.

Now you should have a bet­ter idea of the key ques­tions before start­ing a DMP project.

Most impor­tant­ly, you need to reverse the ques­tions and ask your­self all of them in the real order : ques­tion #5 is real­ly ques­tion #1, ques­tion #4 is #2 etc. Then you will know why you need a Data Man­age­ment Platform.

Want to know more about DMP and dis­cov­er suc­cess stories ?

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