In order to truly target your clients, businesses must recognise that they need to connect with their potential and existing clients at every touchpoint. A touchpoint is a point of contact where your brand, service or product communicates with your clients, prospects, employees and stakeholders. This can happen through various communication channels before, during or after they do business with you. Some examples of touchpoints include the company’s website, email, advertising, sales representatives and even the product itself.
For a business to truly succeed in connecting or create an impression with their target market, one touch point is rarely enough. You will need multiple touch point to create a high impact reach. This is especially important when clients today switch from online to mobile to complete a transaction.
If you do not know where the touchpoints are in your client relationship lifecycle, it is time to create a touchpoint map. Mapping out your business’s touch points will help you understand who your clients are and what experiences they have at all your touchpoints.
Here are a few steps to follow:
- Step 1 – Create a table with four columns with one column for each lifecycle stage. For example, awareness, nurturing, desire, purchase.
- Step 2 – Add a row for each customer segment and then create another row under each lifecycle stage and identify the touchpoints to be added to the map. For example, the touch points can be an event, direct mail, newspaper ads, etc.
- Step 3 – You can then add as much detail as possible by adding who supports the process at each touchpoint. For example, your customer care support team or sales representative.
Once you have your touchpoint map and understand where your client buying lifecycle is at, you can start creating a strategy that will help produce measurable results and improve your customer experience.
Ok that’s it for now. If you have any further questions about mapping out the customer journey or any other small business marketing problems then please contact us directly, or you can start an open forum by adding your comments to this blog.
Article written by Joanne Low
