The goal of marketing is to provide the best offer to the right customer at the right time. The art of picking this optimal combination is why decisioning is a critical component within marketing. Decisioning based on sound data helps marketers achieve the most ROI, relying mainly on first-party data.
DMP and Artificial Intelligence together
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is commonly defined as the science of making machines do things that would require human intelligence. AI machines continuously learn from data inputs and adjust its decisioning/behavior based on the evolving data patterns.
A DMP, on the other hand, serves as a unifying platform to collect, organize and activate any form of data from any source. The most relevant ways we activate data collected in DMP is to create a set of audiences based on a range of similar characteristics like demographics, geographic, behavioral, etc., and to create a unified customer view.
Developing an audience or stitching together singular customer views (SCVs) requires a lot of algorithmic comparison. These algorithms are mostly manually defined/designed based on past experiences of customer data. AI can play a very important role in enhancing the two most important attributes of a DMP.
1. Better Audience Profile Creation
With the help of AI, we can see a shift from using static rules-based audience definition to the more dynamic machine predicted audience definition. From a simple look-alike model to sophisticated deep learning-based audience discovery, AI can greatly assist the creation and quality of the audience created. This will reduce the need for us marketers to understand every signal and define an audience, amidst an influx of high velocity and high variance data.
2. Better Targeting
Customer journeys are defined based on the step/path customers have taken in the past. But with new avenues being added frequently for the customer to interact with our products or services, having a static customer journey is a big drawback. By moving from a manually defined customer journey to a AI’s probabilistic decisioning-based journey, we will be able to quickly adapt to the changes in the journey and target the customer with a better NBA (Next Best Action).
Implementing an AI-based algorithm to a DMP will serve the following benefits:
•Optimizing marketing spend
•Reducing churn/increasing loyalty
•Improving acquisition rates at lower cost
•Expanding cross-sell/upsell opportunity
•Increasing Average Revenue per Customer (ARPC)
The future of AI certainly has all the right things going for it and is poised to change the nature of marketing over the next few years. Building better target audiences and connecting with consumers in more optimal ways are just the beginning. These are just some of the ways leading-edge marketers can leverage AI within their DMP as a core part of their marketing strategy. Evaluate how frequently you need to adjust your audience and customer journey to align to your marketing strategy. If these adjustments are more of a trial-and-error process, then you should give artificial intelligence, powered by your DMP data, a fair chance.
