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How to Create a Touchpoint Strategy That Converts 

 

It is not news that having a great product or service offering is not enough to have a successful business. There are many more touchpoints in a customer’s experience with a brand than just the moment they make a purchase and enjoy the product or service.

What are touchpoints, you may ask?

What is a Customer Touchpoint?

A touchpoint is an interaction between a brand and potential/current customers during their buyer’s journey, any time before, during, and after the purchase. For example, think about a time you saw an online ad, looked through customer reviews and ratings, visited a website, live-chatted with a chatbot or a support rep, read a blog featuring the product or service… and the list goes on. This is just a short list of examples of touchpoints a customer can come in contact with while they move along their buyer’s journey.

Touchpoints play a critical role in influencing a person’s experience, perception, and buying decision of a brand. If businesses can provide the resources people are looking for at the right time in their journey, those touchpoints will offer an excellent brand experience that resonates with their needs.

That is why businesses need more than just a great product or service. They need a robust strategy to satisfy their audience at different touchpoints.

How do you create customer touchpoints?

Identify & Map Your Touchpoints

The first step is to identify your touchpoints. Create a list of all the interactions your brand has with your leads and customers and segment them into the awareness, consideration, decision, and relationship stages. Here is an example:

Download the Customer Touch Points Map

To understand what each stage means, read our blog on the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision of the Customer Journey.

Once you identify all your touchpoints, look for inconsistencies within your brand, gaps in your communications, and new opportunities for additional touchpoints to bridge those gaps. This will help your company provide a better brand and buying experience for your leads and customers.

Conduct Market Research 

If you have identified and mapped your touchpoints without information based on data, they are most likely incomplete. When companies try to create touchpoints, it is natural to think from the company’s perspective and make assumptions about their customers. To create more accurate and effective touchpoints, you need to conduct qualitative and quantitative research.

Most useful data come from those who know your brand best: your team members, your customers, and even lost leads. Conduct surveys and interviews with various people like current customers, lost leads, employees, etc., to gain insights into your audience. Moving right into creating marketing pieces for the assumed touchpoints is likely risky and ineffective as you can end up wasting your resources and reducing the ROI your company needs.

Use this guide to know what insights about your customers you need and what questions you should ask to create effective touchpoints for the awareness, consideration, decision, and relationship stages.

Download the Ultimate Guide to Understanding Your Customers

Create Customer Personas

There are all kinds of shoppers in the world, and there are no identical buyer’s journeys. By creating customer personas, you can map out different variations of buyer’s journeys and touchpoints. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your company’s ideal audience. Once you’ve completed your market research, you will have a much clearer idea of what your customer personas would look like.

You will want to include demographics, background, identifiers, goals, motivations, challenges, pain points, and solution points in your personas. Then, create negative personas, which is a persona of customers you do not want to attract. Keep in mind that you will need multiple personas to accommodate different kinds and groups of customers.

A customer persona is an excellent tool to tailor your content, messaging, and overall marketing approach to meet your ideal customers’ specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.

Review and Improve Your Touchpoint Strategy

Creating touchpoints is not a quick process. Take your time, and plan to review, rework, and improve as you move forward. Your brand, the market, and your audience won’t stay in the same spot as time goes on. Conduct market research regularly to keep your data up to date. Your touchpoints should be relevant, consistent, personal, customer-focused, unique, and clear.

Understand that you can’t be in control of every customer touchpoint. However, it is still important to influence and manage your customer touchpoints where you can by continually improving your processes.

We hope this helped you better understand the importance of knowing your touchpoints and learn how to create a strong touchpoint strategy that turns potential customers into loyal customers.

Turning this information into action could sometimes be challenging. If you need marketing experts to help your company create vital touchpoints that convert, schedule an appointment for a no-charge consultation with the Element212 team here.