The Basics of Data Management Platforms and How They Can Make Your Life Easier
What is a data management platform?
Any business needs intelligence to make informed decisions and needs the right data to support those decision. A business can benefit greatly from data management, which is the practice of collating, storing and using data in real time in a cost effective, secure, and efficient manner.
Data management helps a business reduce potential errors as it establishes processes for using and creating trust in the information being used in data driven decision making. In order to use and manage data collected and stored effectively, a business needs a data management platform. A management platform is used to collect, organize and use first second third party data from various offline and online data sources. The data management platforms are used by businesses to create customer data that can be used to drive targeted ad campaigns and marketing initiatives.
Management platforms make the customer data available to tools like demand side platforms, supply side platforms to improve the targeting audience. A data management platform is the backbone of digital marketing, which allows a business to better understand their target audience.
What does a data management platform do?
Data management platforms collate, organize, store and share data with other marketing technology systems. There are three types of data gathered by a data management platform - first second and third party data - which can be internal or external. Internal data is gathered from company owned channels like websites or emails and external data is gathered from third party agents or partners.
After collecting the audience data, the management platform will organize the information to build customer profiles based on rules defined by marketers, who also link look alike customer profiles into the target audience which receives the targeted advertising or marketing message.
The management platforms also share the audience data with the digital advertising platforms and marketing channels so the platforms know their target audience. The Data Management solutions then collect information on how the ad performs so that they can make better ad purchase decisions.
There are many data management platforms available. Choosing the right one can be a difficult task
This article will explore the basics of data management platforms and how they can make your life easier
How does a data management platform work?
As discussed, Data Management solutions use data from internal and external data sources to build detailed customer profiles for use on targeted advertising and marketing campaigns. But a data platform doesn't manage customer data and execute ad campaigns independently, they are just the link between data sources and delivery.
Let us now discuss in detail how a data management platform functions-
- Data collection- The data platforms collect information from demand side platforms and send it to server side platforms. The server side collates and stores the data for the next step.
- Data normalization- The collected data is then normalized and enriched as the repeated data is deleted and using a data platform's data scheme, the data is enriched with additional data points.
- Data storage- Once the data is normalized and enriched, the data is merged with existing data and stored in a data warehouse. The data is then used to create extensive customer profiles, which is needed for creating audience segments.
- Data analysis- A management platform's job is to perform data analytics using data stored in the data warehouse and create audience segments. These segments make it easier for marketers to break down data and allocate it to specific groups for targeted ad campaigns.
Who can benefit from using a data management platform?
In a business, the upper management has to make decisions that will carry the company forward, hence they benefit the most from using data provided by a management platform to make data-driven decisions.
IT, or networking professionals also use data platforms to gain insights from the platforms to maintain and operate the company systems. Basically, those who benefit from use of a Data Management platform can be divided into publishers, marketers and agencies.
- Publishers are media owners or anyone who own or manage websites. They use data platforms to manage audience data collated from the websites and data driven ad campaigns on these sites. The publishers can get first party data and enrich it with additional audience data to better corporate performance management and also sell the customer data via second third party data exchange.
- Marketers and agencies make use of data management platforms to identify and create audience segments to gather extra data about the target audience regardless of data sources. The insights allow identification of target audience look alike prospects to increase the audience base. These insights are used to carry out data driven marketing and ad campaigns.
What happens after the data is collected?
A data management platform is used to collect raw audience data from various data sources like mobiles, apps, websites and social media. This is the first party data that has been collected from the target audience based on specific behaviors such as clicks, downloads, and uploads, demographic data, socio-economic data, influencer and action data, point of sale data from businesses like restaurants and more.
Once the first party data is collected, it is organized into a hierarchy' based on the business model. The business can use data, which has been categorized, to better understand target audience, and learn more about them and extend your reach to address ad campaign commitments. A data platform is your audience data collected in one place for easy understanding of your customer data, what content they want, and how to reach them effectively.
Data management is a challenging task, and it can be hard to find the right data
Read this article to learn more about how data management platforms can make your life easier
How can I build a data management platform audience?
After opting for a Data Management platform, you need to build your target audience, so identify the most valuable segments and use them across any digital media channel. For a targeted advertising campaign, a marketer can define the target audience based on data collected from the customer profiles built by the data platform. For instance, instead of choosing to spend advertising revenue on a financial services website to reach the target audience, you can build a target audience based on actual behaviors.
A data management platform can build an audience using data from first, second and third party data sources using Boolean logic. Your audience can be limited by the scale you require.
Here are a few data points to consider while building an audience- age, gender, location, browser history, income, size of family, opinions and social media.
A management platform can use second third party data sources to boost the data sources used to build the audience needed.
How do data management platforms help marketing?
A data management platform collates, organizes and stores data which helps marketers create targeted advertising campaigns, reach to look alike prospects and drive ad campaigns based on personal data, which can lead to more ad purchases. A business can use a customer data platform, which integrates data from multiple data sources to build unified customers profiles, which can be used to personalize marketing messages.
Customer data platforms work with anonymous and known data, which can be stored to build accurate customer profiles and share data with any system.
In a business, a data management platform drives new prospects, customer data platform helps you engage with the new leads and customer relation management system helps you manage your ongoing customer relationship. They work in tandem to improve the effectiveness of your ad tech and marketing and ad campaigns.
Data is everywhere. It’s in your company, it’s in your customer’s companies, and it’s in the cloud. But data can be difficult to access, organize and use
This article will explore the basics of data management platforms so you can make an informed decision about what would work best for you and your company