Today’s buyers have an unlimited number of choices when it comes to everything and anything they might want. From clothing, to food, electronics, services, or other products—what makes them decide to purchase your solution over someone else’s? The more you know about your buyers, the more you can give them a personalized experience that will make them more likely to engage and purchase. Sounds easy, right?

It’s not. The sheer amount of data available to marketers makes turning information into insights difficult.

Image via SmartInsights

So what should marketers do?

Luckily, there are a few rules of thumb when it comes to cultivating buyer engagement in a world of information overwhelm.

Focus on the right data: Understanding what data is useful is a big first step. Steer clear of vanity metrics like clicks, followers and opens, and instead drill down on engagement and content consumption.

Measure when and where your buyers respond to content, and utilize those insights to influence your personalization and digital strategy. If they aren’t engaging, measure that too: knowing when and where they’re losing interest is the first step towards understanding why and correcting the problem.

Go where your buyers are: Make sure to spend time where your buyers are—both online and offline—so that you can understand where they seek information, whom they trust, and what influences them. If you don’t know where they are, make it a priority to figure that out.

According to a post from ConversionXL, buyers tend to use a mix of sources including your site, peers, and even family members. Learn what publications they read for information, whom they value as influencers (whether peers or analysts or others), and find out whether they are active on social media or prefer more traditional channels like in-person events or networking groups.

If you don’t know where your buyers are, you’ll hardly be prepared to deliver relevant content to them, let alone offer a personalized experience if they come to you. Delivering value through personal relevance is critical in our engagement economy, and being familiar with the spaces where your customers are building their communities and gathering information is an essential part of the puzzle.

Integrate data sources: Marketers often have data stored across the organization (sorry, GDPR) in various silos, in different geographies, systems, desktops, or even in notebooks.

Personalizing to maximize engagement requires that you integrate and streamline data sources so that you can build a holistic view of your buyer. Once you have all the data, the next step is to get it into a usable format.

Once the data is gathered and distilled down to the most relevant points, marketers can begin to build insights. These deep buyer insights are what top performing organizations use to build personalized, omnichannel strategies that increase engagement, improve customer experience, and ultimately drive more revenue.

To learn more about how to utilize buyer insights and deliver a personalized experience for customers, check out the recent MarTech Advisor interview with Maribeth Ross, SVP of Marketing for Monetate.