{"id":48826,"date":"2020-10-17T15:15:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-17T19:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sogolytics.com\/blog\/?p=48826"},"modified":"2023-05-26T09:54:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T13:54:07","slug":"how-customer-touchpoints-drive-marketing-strategies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sogolytics.com\/blog\/how-customer-touchpoints-drive-marketing-strategies\/","title":{"rendered":"How do customer touchpoints drive marketing strategies in a competitive environment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is a customer touchpoint?<\/h2>\n

Imagine this\u2014you leave by car from your home in Boca Raton. Your destination? A hotel in Miami 50 miles away. You stop off at two service stations along the way for gas and refreshments. Once in the city, you visit the zoo, the beach, attend a concert, buy a beach umbrella, and check-in to your hotel. Once settled, you eat with the family at a restaurant. After that, you lodge the kids in the games room and speak to the concierge for tourist advice before bed. Sure, there are more details in between, but that’s good enough to get us started.<\/p>\n

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From a bird’s-eye view, your trip from home to hotel can be called a pretty straightforward journey. However, zoning in closer on the car’s direction, we can see it wasn’t a straight, uninterrupted flow. There were numerous pauses to complete activities and transactions. We can easily connect the dots and show it as a pinned roadmap.<\/p>\n

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Coming down to earth, let’s look at each of the pinpoints on that roadmap to note what happened there (i.e., the gas stations, the zoo, the concert, etc.). We call these touchpoints\u2014the moments of connection in the process of reaching your destination.<\/p>\n

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\"pinpoints<\/a><\/p>\n

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Your customers aren’t any different. When they have a want or need, they embark on a Customer Journey along a route (i.e., a Customer Journey Map<\/a>) made up of stops and starts along the way (i.e., Customer Touchpoints) to find a solution. The essence of a market place is that, given there are numerous ways to arrive at one answer, brands compete\u2014hoping that they will prevail and be the customer’s final touchpoint (the proverbial “Miami hotel”, if you will).<\/p>\n

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The most successful products and customer service<\/a> promotions predict the customer journey\u2019s shape by determining all the customer touchpoints essential to get the customer to the buying cart (and beyond). Management plots these out to review in a customer journey map. Through segmentation exercises, sophisticated marketers go to great lengths finding customers with the same needs (i.e., that think and act alike) and who will likely journey along the same customer route most of the time.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the thing\u2014every touchpoint along the way must be a positive experience. Otherwise, the route followed won’t go the marketer’s way.<\/p>\n

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Revisiting Miami<\/h2>\n

If one or more of the following had occurred, the journey would undoubtedly have aborted or deviated severely\u2014maybe ending up in Fort Lauderdale instead (or back home).<\/p>\n

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  1. The filling station was out of gas.<\/li>\n
  2. The zoo was closed.<\/li>\n
  3. The concert tickets were too expensive.<\/li>\n
  4. COVID-19 shut down the beaches.<\/li>\n
  5. The hotel standard was disappointing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In short, defective touchpoints in a customer’s journey have the power to change plans radically. From a customer’s viewpoint (or travelers for that matter), it will remain as a memorable customer experience<\/a> (CX) for all the right or wrong reasons. Brand loyalty builds around the former. A string of customer touchpoints that flow seamlessly into one another defines a smooth CX with accolades and five-star reviews. Conversely, a bumpy ride with calamitous customer experience\u2014even at one touchpoint\u2014can be the rotten apple that spoils the whole barrel.<\/p>\n

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    Looking at Customer Touchpoints from Every Angle<\/h2>\n

    We live in the digital era with Google, the internet, and myriad SaaS apps swarming around the environment. Customers are shopping online\u2014inquiring, seeking advice, buying, complaining, recommending to friends, tweeting, Instagramming, and returning goods. They flood the airwaves with continuous action, most of it traceable with the right technology.<\/p>\n

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    Another way of looking at this is there’s a torrent of customer touchpoints coming through the virtual channels, carried on the backs of multiple customer experience journeys.<\/p>\n

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    To make things more complicated, customers behave somewhat haphazardly, moving in and out of websites, going offline into brick-and-mortar stores, perusing reviews, and seeking tech advice before pulling the trigger. There may be tens of customer touchpoints in even the most straightforward customer experience journey and maybe hundreds connected to more complicated propositions.<\/p>\n

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    When it gets down to B2B situations, the journey has many tributaries, deviating to decision influencers who hold much power over the final decision’s direction.<\/p>\n

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    Given all the above, we can say this:<\/p>\n

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