The era of data has started and there is no going back. Long gone are the days when business competed solely based on rich content or product catalogs, talent and great designs. Winning businesses today are the ones who understand their end users and provide unprecedented personalization.
Today, about 13 billion devices are connected to the internet. By 2020, it is expected to grow between 50-70 billion, averaging 10 devices per user.
Even with big teams, it is near impossible to efficiently understand such huge amounts of different types of data across different devices and leverage that to make informed decisions.
Without a smart plan of action to use the data to produce business insights, the data itself becomes a white elephant – expensive and useless.
There are a number of challenges marketers currently face when trying to gain actionable insights from large data sets.
The most notable ones are inconsistent data formats, sparsity of data and latency of data models. While we can solve for inconsistent data formats and sparsity of data by smart data collection tactics, solving for latency is an art which requires expertise in scale, data science and common sense! It’s a fine balance between finding the most accurate result in the infinite amount of time and finding the result that gives maximizes return taking tolerable time.
In the highly competitive world where every business is fighting for consumer attention, many times the results become unusable if they are not available at near real time.
Marketers use data management platforms today to centralize their audiences across different parts of their organizations such as CRM teams, point of sale teams, and behavioral analytics teams, as well as from third party data providers and second party exchange partners.
Once they centralize their audiences, they create user groups for various marketing activities and personalize their experience across all marketing and advertising channels. Investing in making every part of this journey smart by leveraging data science will be crucial to optimize spend and maximize conversions.
How can DMP marketers get smarter today?
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Understand the sources of your data
- Are you making the right buy decisions? Test the quality of the third party data by creating different segments and comparing their conversions.
- Explore second party partnerships who can provide a richer picture of your audience
- Bring back conversion metrics to your platform. Only when you know the conversion, you can optimize your marketing efforts towards that goal.
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Create smarter segments
- Leverage popular data science algorithms to calculate propensities of your audience towards your desired conversion metric such as ad clicks, longest engagement time, product purchase
- Combine third party or second party data which adds a different lens and run audience clustering and see how audience group together when you add different sets of data
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Use intelligent targeting
- Understand which platform provides the highest conversion for your campaign by splitting the same audience groups across multiple channels and test the conversions.
- Create different segments for higher and medium propensity users and test different messages
Leveraging data science in marketing is not a solved problem. The industry is still evolving to bring the data scientists and marketers together to help drive effective business decisions. However, data science can no longer be for the elite.
Democratization of data science has already begun and we, marketers, are ready for the challenge.
Lakshmi Shivalingaiah is Product Manager for Adobe Audience Manager.