o improve customer engagement and expand market share more effectively, modern marketers should use the following formula when evaluating smart tool options: Decision Engineering + Advanced Analytics + Cutting-Edge Technology writes, Anil Kaul Co-Founder and CEO of Absolutdata

As a modern marketer, the top item on your to-do list is increasing market share by improving customer engagement. Data-driven marketing technology can help you check that item off your list, but only if you have the quality data you need to effectively conduct outreach. To ensure that you get the data you require, it’s important to work closely with sales and customer support on a data-driven strategy that centers on customer engagement.

Since customer engagement success depends on quality data, it’s critical to effectively integrate data that comes in via internal and external channels. Marketers attempting to integrate data often find obstacles due to data arriving in formats that aren’t ready to use, the presence of clustered or inconsistent data, data that needs to be cleansed before use, etc. This is where having the right technology solutions and a sound strategy is essential.

Whether for B2B or B2C marketing purposes, marketers who seek customer engagement need to find a way to integrate data from multiple sources and analyze it to yield insights that improve decision-making. To get the smart tools you need, consider this formula when evaluating your options: Decision Engineering + Advanced Analytics + Cutting-Edge Technology.

It All Starts with Decision Engineering

The usual approach for data-driven marketers has been to streamline their data, then analyze it for clues that help them make better decisions. It’s time to flip that script : Decision engineering, which is based on expecting and extracting more from your data, is a better approach. It starts with identifying decision points up front, then applying analytics and technology to data to create a sustainable, scalable customer engagement strategy.

With technology that can harmonize data and extract information from data lakes, marketing becomes truly data-driven, taking in information from online and offline sources and removing inconsistencies and anomalies to deliver relevant, quality data. Decision engineering allows marketers to focus on their objectives rather than sifting through data to find clues to direct their efforts.

Decision engineering is forward-looking. It gives you the predictive power of data instead of concentrating exclusively on historical data sets. Rather than a marketing strategy centered on running models on warehoused data, decision engineering integrates analytics to drive future-focused marketing.

Next Step: Applying Advanced Analytics

Advanced analytics and smart algorithms are table stakes today — they aren’t a “nice to have” tool but rather an essential component to help marketers reach their goal . By applying advanced analytics, you can improve your customer engagement game with smart targeting, creating segments based on prospective customers’ lifestyles instead of demographics.

Personalization is the key building block of a successful customer engagement strategy. Advanced analytics help you personalize outreach more effectively by picking up data signals that enable you to target ads based on customers’ interests. It takes the guesswork out of deciding on which offers to make. Advanced analytics facilitate data decision-making, allowing you to reach your objectives.

Using Technology to Remove the Friction

Delivering a friction-free customer experience improves sales, which is why modern marketers are turning to advanced technology like artificial intelligence (AI) to make transactions as easy as possible from the customers’ point of view. Chatbots are a prime example of a technology that eliminates friction from a customer’s interaction with a brand, which is why the use of chatbots is becoming more mainstream.

Progressive, a leading insurer, now uses a “Flo” chatbot on Facebook Messenger. The AI-powered chatbot provides quotes while engaging customers and reinforcing the brand’s overall message. The B2C sector has increased the use of AI tools like chatbots, but the B2B sector can also benefit from the use of AI technologies, which allow the companies that use them to redirect scarce customer support resources to more strategic tasks.

With an AI-driven guide that delivers personalized sales recommendations, companies of all types can turn leads into customers and improve win rates. AI solutions with machine learning algorithms maximize the utility of existing data while learning from feedback to continuously improve performance. AI can anticipate next-best actions and generate prescriptive recommendations, improving the overall buying experience.

Sustaining Sales Success

As a marketer, you’ve witnessed an incredible evolution in customer expectations, even if you’ve been in marketing for a relatively short time. Marketing leaders know customer demand will continue to change over time, but it can be a challenge to evolve their marketing strategy to keep up with the changes. Technology can help, offering an array of channels and generating copious data to help marketers improve engagement.

With a decision engineering approach that incorporates advanced analytics and cutting-edge technology, marketers can evolve as needed to meet performance objectives . Rather than focusing on data, they can focus on decision points, applying analytics and technology to data in new ways to personalize outreach, automate core processes and drive sales velocity. In this way, as a modern marketer, you can meet your short-term goals and achieve sustained success.