As a digital marketer for one of today’s leading financial institutions, you share the same goal as many other marketers: to attract, convert, and retain customers. The strategy you employ to make this happen can vary, as with all marketing, but the key to successfully achieving your goals is having access to high-quality customer data, and taking action on that data. No matter which step you are in, a data management platform, or DMP, can help collect, organize, analyze, and activate your data for efficient and effective targeted marketing.
Let’s walk through the role that a DMP plays in the marketing efforts of a financial firm.
As a marketer, the first step in attracting new customers is getting your brand out there. In traditional media that might include billboards or print ads, and on the digital side can include emails, banner ads, native content, and beyond. All of this is working to acquire the customers.
With a DMP, you can gather data from any source, including your website, mobile apps, social, offline sources such as your CRM, and combine it together into one cohesive view of the customer. If you have great data about your customers in disparate databases, the DMP helps to identify the user consistently across platforms and bring in the data from multiple sources to combine and activate it.
Now that the data is combined and you have a single view of the customer, you can use the DMP to build audiences to target your messaging to. If you’re trying to reach a group of “high net worth” individuals on the west coast, the DMP allows you to build as precise an audience as you want. While the past method of “spray and pray” may have worked years ago, sophisticated marketers are much more inclined to expect audience targeted advertising.
Once you have your audiences built, you can activate them by sending them out to a DSP or other platform for targeted advertising. If you have the data you need and just want to send your messaging to that specific group of people, the DMP is the perfect tool.
On the contrary, if you have an audience built of existing customers and only want to reach net new customers, you can exclude, or suppress, a particular audience from your targeted marketing, so you decrease ad waste. By excluding a group you don’t want to spend on, you have more advertising dollars left to spend on new customers. ROI increases.
If you’ve built the perfect audience, but it doesn’t look quite big enough, you may want to try adding some lookalike modeling to your plan. DMPs are equipped with machine learning tools that can take your small “seed” audience and help you identify additional net new people who also fit the bill. This is an opportunity to grow your target audience even before you begin targeting them.
If you know your users aren’t just interacting with your brand on desktop, you’ll likely want to consider adding in cross-device targeting to your marketing plan. DMPs like Lotame should offer cross-device technology to identify your target audience on any screen, so you can reach them when and where they are most likely to engage.
Once this prospective new customer actually reaches your site, you need to give them the right incentive so that they convert into a customer. And once they have become a customer, you need to keep the conversation going, by understanding what the customer needs and giving them what they want to retain them as customers. Personalization is the key evolution in today’s digital marketing, and a DMP is often the missing link in how to make it happen.
By linking a DMP to your CMS, you can sync the two systems to show specific content to certain audiences. This produces many opportunities for cross-selling. For example, you can show a savings account opportunity to existing checking account owners. Each webpage has different levels of personalization opportunity. Your team will need to dig in to find out which ones are most effective.
Another opportunity similar to the one described above is awareness personalization. In this case, you would use DMP to identify potential investors, and let them know about a new investing tool. Targeted messaging for this audience gives you the chance to personalize messaging to resonate with specific group of audience instead of spray & pray.
Privacy is a huge concern for financial institutions, specifically around risk aversion and risk mitigation regarding customer data. The good news is that DMPs do not store customer data. Unlike a CRM, DMPs do not collect or store any personally identifiable information (PII), such as customer names or contact information. All data in a DMP is anonymous.
Whether you are focused on identifying new customers, upselling existing customers, or retaining those valued customers, harnessing the power of data is the key. A data management platform offers financial institutions the ability to turn your mountains of data into a goldmine, in a privacy-friendly manner. For more information about Lotame’s DMP and how it can help you achieve your marketing goals, contact us for a demo of the platform.