Are you maximizing every touchpoint you have with your customers?
People tend not to make a purchase on their first interaction with your business. Instead, they go on a customer journey that takes in multiple touchpoints. In B2B, this journey can often be complicated, which means your ability to funnel people through the customer journey and create touchpoints is essential.
Every touchpoint you have with your customer should be designed to enable more touchpoints, and this is when digital marketing is at its best.
Why are Touchpoints Important?
Touchpoints are every interaction your customer has with your business. Each interaction has the potential to lead a customer a step closer to making a purchase, but equally, each can end up being the last interaction you have with that person.
This is why it’s essential you understand how each touchpoint will lead the customer on to the next phase of the customer journey, creating further touchpoints.
You not only want your touchpoints to be positive interactions with customers, but they need to funnel people through the customer journey. For example, if someone lands on your blog and loves your content, but leaves because you have not encouraged them to take more action, then you may never see that potential customer again.
Every touchpoint is an opportunity to create another one until eventually, you’ve created a repeat customer (touchpoints don’t end once someone buys your product).
The B2B Customer Journey
The B2B customer journey can be particularly complex because of the number of stakeholders involved in decision-making.
If you’re selling a piece of software that’s an integral part of how a business functions for example, then there will be multiple stages to the process. You might have a junior employee who does the initial research before a department head takes over, and finally, the decision might be signed-off by the CEO.
This leaves lots of opportunities for businesses to drop out of your customer journey. All it takes is the junior employee to pass his research over to the department head, and for that person to perform a Google search where you don’t show up, and suddenly, your lead might go quiet.
However, if you’re constantly putting yourself in a position to create touchpoints with everyone in the decision-making process, then fewer people are going to slip out of the funnel.
A Rounded Digital Marketing Approach
Digital marketing is such a powerful tool for B2B’s because it allows you to create touchpoints at every point of the customer journey. In our example, the junior employee might have recognized the need for new technology because of a Facebook post, but when the decision-making process got passed up the chain, the department head clicked a PPC ad, and the CEO was drawn to an organic listing.
A rounded approach allows you to have lots of hooks in the water, and when they do make a catch, you’ve also got the tools to progress that person through the customer journey.
If your marketing focus is very narrow, then you don’t have the same ability to keep people in the funnel. For example, if you’re relying solely on PPC, then you’re hoping people click your ad at each stage of the decision-making process. If your marketing is constantly targeting your audience through SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and other methods though, then fewer people are going to slip through the cracks.
Digital marketing allows you to keep creating touchpoints with your target audience, but the narrower your focus is, the less this is likely to happen.
Marketing Has to Encourage Action
Touchpoints aren’t useful unless they get people to take action.
Making that initial touchpoint where someone clicks your organic listing is great, but what are they going to do next? This is why your content and copy have to be extremely focused and goal-oriented, guiding people through the customer journey.
One of the most important aspects for creating more touchpoints with potential customers is optimizing your landing pages. If you’re going to guarantee further touchpoints with your visitors, then you need to get contact details, and there is an art to this.
Creating those initial touchpoints, and keeping people in your funnel at every stage of the decision-making process is one side of marketing, but the other side is actually turning this into sales, and this is where you need to be able to inspire action. This is why digital marketing can’t just be focused on traffic acquisition, but it has to be fully focused on converting.
Takeaways
Your digital marketing strategy has to take into account the customer journey and how touchpoints fit into this.
A well-rounded digital marketing approach is going to allow you to create those initial touchpoints with customers, but it’s also about how you develop the relationship and continue to create further interactions. Doing this successfully can super-charge the performance of your marketing, ensuring you turn traffic into repeat customers.
Understanding your audience is one of the first steps of marketing, and the customer journey is a big part of this. Once you have this knowledge, and you recognize where people fit into your customer journey, then you can start to take advantage of each touchpoint to guide people through your funnel.
B2B customer journeys are often complicated, meaning people drop in and out of the funnel. However, when you’re able to create lots of touchpoints that lead to yet more interactions, then you’re going to be able to get more people into your journey and progress a greater number all the way through to completion.
