Your core data sets of tar­get ac­counts and con­tacts alone re­quire a data man­age­ment plat­form (DMP).  The in­creas­ing­ly dig­i­tized econ­o­my to­day de­mands more: Data man­age­ment will be the back­bone for steer­ing your mar­ket­ing cam­paigns.

Sources are eclec­tic:

• Ex­ist­ing con­tacts from your cus­tomer re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment sys­tem CRM
• Re­searched data
• En­ter­prise Re­source Plan­ning (ERP) sys­tems con­tain­ing ship­ment and oth­er fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions
• Lists for mail­ings and oth­er nur­tur­ing ac­tiv­i­ties
• Mem­bers of pre­vi­ous mar­ket­ing cam­paigns such as door open­ers or tele­mar­ket­ing ac­tiv­i­ties
• Agency data sup­plied in­clud­ing par­tic­i­pants of events or we­bi­na­rs
• Im­por­tant: feed­back and re­sults gained from cam­paigns

There are dif­fer­ent lev­els of data man­age­ment:

1. En­tire Uni­verse: cre­ation of a com­plete eco-sys­tem in­clud­ing dy­nam­ic data of all con­tacts, en­gage­ment and pur­chase his­to­ries, buy­ing po­ten­tial and in­tent data, plus more. For en­ter­pris­es this de­mands plat­forms like Or­a­cle Cloud or Tableau.  Typ­i­cal de­vel­op­ment cy­cles start at 1.5 years.  It might take even longer be­fore Mar­ket­ing will be able to re­trieve data for cam­paigns.
2. Cam­paign-data spe­cif­ic: Rel­e­vant data for cam­paign mem­bers. The data­base will be­come more com­plex over time as re­sult data (leads, in­tent data, KPIs, more en­rich­ments) feed into it. Yet, the start­ing point are suf­fi­cient data to start the mar­ket­ing cam­paign.  Tim­ing: should al­ways be the cur­rent or next quar­ter.
3. Sup­port for Ad-hoc ac­tiv­i­ties: this could in­clude ac­tiv­i­ties such as pur­chas­ing a cer­tain num­ber of leads in a spec­i­fied qual­i­ty from a third par­ty, pro­vid­ing very few pieces of con­tent and ex­clude cus­tomer se­lec­tions

Data­bas­es can ma­te­ri­al­ize as EXCEL, sta­t­ic SQL, cloud-based SQL or ap­pli­ca­tion-spe­cif­ic based on CRMs such as sales​force​.com.