Understanding touchpoints and marketing funnels: A simple guide for marketeers
When it comes to understanding how customers interact with your brand, the concept of touchpoints is key. Before a purchase is made, every interaction a customer has with your brand during their journey is known as a touchpoint. These touchpoints can happen across various channels, whether it's searching for your brand online, reading reviews, chatting with customer service, signing up for a trial, receiving an email reminder, or making a purchase.
Why Touchpoints Matter
Touchpoints are crucial because they give insight into the decisions customers make along their journey to buying your product or service. These interactions can happen on your website or app, but they also include engagements on social media, through display ads, or even in person. Monitoring touchpoints helps you understand customer behavior and tailor your strategies to meet their needs.
Touchpoints Are About Context
It’s easy to label general categories like "social media" or "email" as touchpoints, but it’s more effective to dig deeper. Think of touchpoints as specific interactions that fulfill a customer’s need. For instance, instead of just saying "social media," consider a customer’s reaction to a flash sale on Twitter as a touchpoint. Here, the context is curiosity, and the need is to save money. By focusing on the context and the customer’s needs, you get a clearer picture of what drives them.
Putting the Customer First
Touchpoints should always be viewed from the customer’s perspective. For example, if you’re looking at touchpoints through the lens of your business goals, you might focus on how many interactions lead to sales. While this is valuable, taking a customer-centric approach provides deeper insights into what motivates their decisions.
Key Takeaways
To make the most of touchpoints, define them clearly for all your channels, and always relate them back to the customer’s needs. Customer-centric touchpoints offer the most useful data on what drives their preferences and behaviors.
The Evolution of Marketing Funnels
Marketing funnels are another essential tool for guiding your business strategies. A marketing funnel helps you focus and coordinate your efforts at each stage of the customer journey. Traditional funnels have four main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Loyalty.
Over time, marketing funnels have evolved to reflect changes in technology, business practices, and customer behavior. Today, we have various types of funnels, including those tailored specifically for digital marketing, e-commerce, social media, and content marketing.
Different Types of Funnels
- Traditional Sales Funnel: This is the classic model with stages like Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. It’s designed to guide customers from learning about your brand to making a purchase.
- Combined Marketing and Sales Funnel: This funnel integrates marketing and sales efforts, adding stages like Desire and Conversion to ensure a seamless customer journey from initial interest to repeat purchases.
- Digital Marketing Funnel: Tailored to online interactions, this funnel includes stages like Engagement, Consideration, Remarketing, Conversion, and Retention, focusing on digital touchpoints to drive conversions.
- Specialized Funnels: Different marketing areas have their own funnels, such as e-commerce, social media, and content marketing. Each is designed to meet the unique needs of its respective area, whether that’s turning followers into advocates or guiding customers from awareness to purchase in an online store.
Final Thoughts
Marketing funnels and touchpoints are powerful tools when used together. While there’s no one-size-fits-all funnel, understanding and optimizing the right funnel for your business can significantly impact your outcomes. Remember, the most effective strategies are those that are customer-centric, meeting your audience’s needs at every stage of their journey.