The connections you make with customers or clients matter. A brand touchpoint is an individual contact point between the customer and the brand. This isn’t usually a single moment. In fact, most companies have over 100 different brand touchpoints. These are broadly defined interactions, ranging from in-person selling to email marketing messages.
With that in mind, it’s never been more important to understand brand touchpoints and why they matter. When creating your customer journey map, you need to understand the key areas your customers are focused on. By anticipating brand touchpoints in advance, you’re prepared to overcome challenges, concerns, and anything else that gets in the way of a sale or transaction.
In marketing, there’s something known as the rule of 7. This refers to the average of 7 interactions it takes with a consumer and a brand before they’re ready to make a purchase. When you focus on creating a superb customer experience with each of those brand touchpoints, you make a real impact. Not only does this have the potential to boost your revenue, but it also leads to customer loyalty.
When it comes to customer loyalty, they always say that a great experience is key. With that in mind, it’s time to get serious about brand touchpoints. Keep reading to learn what they are about, and how to nail down the top 5 which are essential in today’s marketing battleground. How you connect with your customers makes all the difference in how they feel about your brand.
What is a Brand Touchpoint?
First and foremost, what is a brand touchpoint? Simply put, it is defined as the interactions and exposures consumers have with brands. This doesn’t have a single definition beyond this. It can be both deliberate communications and interactions consumers have on their own in their daily lives.
In customer journey mapping, brands take the time to determine their key brand touchpoints. These are moments when they reach out to the consumer to provide value, share a new product, or outsell the competition. They can be strictly sales-focused, or more general, designed to create a positive impression of the brand.
Brand touchpoints are things you’re likely already familiar within your daily life. Things like TV ads, search engine ads, and social media posts are all forms of brand touchpoints. They can be physical, like a direct mail postcard or business card, incorporating your brand identity. They can also be in-person, as a live event, or by providing great customer service at storefronts.
And why are they important? When you focus on providing a targeted, engaging experience, your customers notice. And when you consider the best ways to communicate and interact with your audience, you create engaged superfans who are loyal to your brand.
Key Brand Touchpoints to Nail
Not every brand touchpoint is the right fit for every audience. When in doubt, consider how your audience spends their time both in-person and online. What are their preferred methods of communication? Most importantly, these will continue to evolve as your customers’ expectations change over time.
Here are 5 brand touchpoints that you should note. These digital solutions aim to help you connect with your customers, viewers, and users.
- Social Media
With social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can reach thousands of people who may be potential customers. You can target these people via wall posts, hashtags, and paid advertorials, or via social media influencers, all of which are good avenues for customer acquisitions. Be sure to jazz up your accounts with your brand identity.Not only that, but you should also use these platforms to forge relationships, keeping an eye out for customer reviews, appropriately interacting with customers and clients via chats or messages, and boosting your branding when opportunities arise. - Online Advertorials
Also known as digital banner ads, this is another digital solution that regularly appears on various websites, either as pop-ups, on the sides, at the bottom, or on the top. This is an effective touchpoint that helps drive traffic and leads to your website, or directly to your company.Go for attention-grabbing headliners and eye-catching visuals that follow your branding, and create a sense of presence for your brand. Make the visitors not want to close the ads, and instead leave a good impression.Another online advertorial platform is Search Engine Marketing, where your website link appears as text ads on the search engine results page. When Internet users search for terms related to your brand and business, your ad pops up, inviting them to click in to learn more. - Search Engine Optimisation
And that leads to another search engine-related brand touchpoint, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Almost every brand with an online presence relies on search engines to connect with consumers, and SEO helps you take control of those connections. By making your website and online assets easy to find for curious Googlers, you open your brand up to more engagement and also more conversions.SEO utilises strategically selected keywords and queries with high search volumes and leverages several other technical strategies that allow search engines to “crawl” sites and serve them up as relevant search results. Think SEO is too challenging? Your branding agency may be able to help. - Blog Content
And working hand-in-hand with SEO is regular blog posts and content. Posting quality content on a blog on your website can grow your organic search traffic by over 400 percent. However, solid SEO results aren’t only the reason blog content facilitates some powerful consumer touchpoints. When your blog posts are well-written, visually appealing, and built on accurate information and data, prospective customers will see you as an authority in your industry. Consumers will find you because of your search-optimised blog, but they will also seek out new touchpoints because you are helping them find what they are looking for, (thanks to your insights, your products, and your services). - Your Company Website
And of course, at some point, consumers will come to your company website. To make this an enjoyable and useful consumer touchpoint, spend time developing the UI/UX (user interface and experience) and check all of your content to ensure that it is error-free, fully functional, and up-to-date. This may be a multi-faceted process if your site has many different kinds of pages, such as a blog, e-commerce section, an interactive portal, and/or embedded media. A website is a representation of the company as a whole, and too many organisations overlook small errors that may end up turning an otherwise compelling touchpoint into a distracting experience.
Create a Branding Experience with Brand Touchpoints that Connects Well
Looking to up your branding game and wanting to nail that series of brand touchpoints and digital solutions? Seeking help to manage the brand touchpoints for your business? I Concept Singapore is ready to assist.
I Concept Singapore is a branding agency specialising in digital marketing. We can help guide new businesses to carve out a niche of their own, developing strong brand touchpoints to reach their potential customers. Businesses looking for a digital marketing boost, be it a revamped website or developing social media content, can also get in contact with us.
