[Interview] Salesforce DMP: “It’s the Spine for a Complete Data-Driven Marketing Strategy.”

The marketing trends for the next few years are clear: the customer needs to be in the center of the entire strategy.  It's important to know what their likes and interests are and use this information to create personalized campaigns to achieve this objective. This technology allows us to obtain this information and develop strategies by segments comfortably and straightforwardly. We told you what Salesforce DMP is, a platform thank combines Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to know our audience better. Now, we’d like to share excerpts from an interview we had Laura Guzmán Linares, Regional Vice President Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, to go into more detail about this valuable tool.

WAM: What is Salesforce DMP and how does it work?

Laura Guzmán: Salesforce DMP is the spine for a complete data-driven marketing strategy since it lets you increase the insights and knowledge you have about your customers.

Salesforce is a solution created with a mobile-first vocation in a world where Big Data is prioritized. In this way, it allows for the management of vast quantities of data, whether unstructured or structured, without the need for rigid taxonomy. Meaning, instead of needing the human factor to see what information we have to analyze or not, DMP examines all the variables.

Another equally disruptive point is that this technology gathers and unifies all the data taken from both online and offline sources. This way, it organizes them to activate completely personalized communications based on what it knows about every specific customer.

As an example, for a firm in the travel industry, the solutions currently out there are capable of analyzing their users’ behavior based on the destinations they're looking for; but if we add new destinations on the website, the existing Big Data tools don't "know" how to derive conclusions about them if we don't tell them before. With DMP a new destination is a new piece of data to analyze and cross with the Big Data we already have stored. It allows us to reorder what we already know based on new insights to give customers completely personalized offers.

W: What are its main characteristics?

L.G.: Salesforce DMP is a solution that’s based on business intelligence where all the information gathered is scalable, usable, and actionable. Also, we know that, in the Big Data era, users prioritize trust above all. Therefore, users’ consent for us treating their data is something that’s vital for us at Salesforce.  

The platform has a cross-device Artificial Intelligence layer that analyzes all the data for each user from all the devices Big Data gathers. This is where the tool's real value comes from as it lets marketing professionals offer their clients the offers that best meet their needs.  

At the same time, its asset segmentation layer lets the technology propose new customer segments that have not been located, thanks to its machine learning layer.

W: Up to what point can you get to know your audience with Salesforce DMP?

L.G.: The excellent value point that this new technology provides is that it not only helps gather first-party data (any interaction the user has with a brand: whether it be on the website, app, email, etc.); Salesforce DMP helps marketing professionals aggregate all data for every user, including second-party data and third-party data.

This means that by enriching the data with the information we obtain, and always with the user's consent, in sources that can even be offline, with the aim of offering a single view of every user in terms of their interactions with the brand as well as the ones they make in other contexts.

Salesforce DMP is a potent tool to cross the data a brand gathers in their online properties with the ones they get from external sources, such as online deal aggregators.

The information we get about each one of the customers is rich: we know the average amount they spend, their recurrence, their met needs, their historical data, etc. Not only that; we can also get information from a third-party about an active search from this user about a particular product or service. Therefore, Salesforce DMP helps marketing professionals to provide them with an offer completely customized for that user.

W: How can we improve the user experience through the data gathered in the tool?

L.G.: Once we have an approximate idea of who each of our customers is, thanks to second-party data, Salesforce DMP lets us create concrete segments within the database we already have. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, we can activate campaigns for every audience in every type of digital context.

This means we can cross the information we have about the user to impact them with the campaign or campaigns that are most appropriate to their stage of the journey. This will allow us to communicate with them using advertising, email, or websites with dynamic context with the information that is of most useful in each phase of the funnel they find themselves in.

Salesforce DMP has a completely holistic vision about activating campaigns for every user. To do so, after a user has gone onto our brand’s website, we’ll be able to present them with a particular display advertising campaign based on the information they saw, and we can then carry out personalized email marketing actions. In other words, DMP “talks” to all the other tools in the funnel, whether they’re from Salesforce or made with other technology.