What are your brand's touchpoints?
Before I go on talking about what touchpoints are and what they have to do with your brand, I want you to take a look at my previous article on workflows, client journeys, and your brand. In that article, there's a definition of what a client journey is, but a very quick summary here is this...
A client journey is also commonly referred to as a customer journey or customer experience, and consists of objectives, goals, feelings, touchpoints, and more. Your client journey is closely related to your brand awareness goals because the main point of it is to transform a person from your audience and into a brand ambassador.
In this article, I am going to focus more on touchpoints themselves.
WHAT IS A TOUCHPOINT?
A touchpoint can be defined as any way your audience can interact with your brand. This can be through face-to-face interactions, website visits, social media posts, freebies, and more. Basically, I want you to think of a touchpoint as anything you create for your brand that your audience sees.
PS. Yes, there are parts of your brand that your audience doesn't see and interact with. One of the most common examples would be your tax filing statements. Your audience does not have access to these and they do not make an impact on your audience.
WHERE IS A TOUCHPOINT USED?
A client journey consists of five main stages from discovery to turning into a brand ambassador and there are multiple touchpoints in every single step. Here are some examples of touchpoints you may be using (or think about using) for every stage of the client journey...
DISCOVERY
The point of this stage is to make yourself discoverable, get traffic, and attract strangers to your brand. Without any touchpoints, this step is impossible. The main purpose here is to attract people who have no clue who you are and give them an incentive to learn more about you and interact with your content.
A perfect example of a touchpoint during this stage is your social media content. You are sharing information about yourself and your brand, throwing it into the ether, and hoping it will draw someone's attention. But you've also read all the social media gurus and downloaded all the freebies already and you've added a CTA to your post.
That call-to-action is prompting your audience to interact with your content, turning it from a regular social media post about your field of expertise, into a touchpoint where not only your audience can interact with, but you can also learn more about them yourself. Think of it as a way to open the door to communication with your audience.
OUTLINE
During the outline stage, your job is to solve your audience's problems and provide them with general help about your topic of expertise. This stage can be very similar to the previous stage of discovery, but where the point of discovery is to attract people, the main point here is to provide value.
An example here could be your social media posts as well, solving small problems and issues with a cool post about the topic. But another touchpoint you can use here is freebies. These have become so popular with online entrepreneurs that it almost feels like the norm to have on to provide knowledge and get people interested.
Freebies, as known to your audience, are also commonly referred to as lead magnets. Their point is to give you information about your audience and who is downloading your freebies. Having said that, remember that the download comes only after letting people know that you and your freebie actually exist.
RESEARCH
When you get to know your audience more, you start interacting with them. The point of this stage is to start nurturing your relationships with your audience and look at them as individuals. This is also the point at which you usually become a person to your audience, not only a brand posting on social media and handing out random freebies.
Touchpoints during this stage of the client journey are more personal and limited. They are usually not available to everyone. Think of private conversations on social media, you don't talk to every single one of your followers to learn more about them, though that doesn't mean you can't. In this case, the platform you're using to talk to them is your touchpoint.
Another example is your newsletter. Not everybody is part of it and the information you provide is more focused on the specific people part of your mailing list. These are the people that have already discovered you and have downloaded your freebie (how you got them on your list), so they are ready for another step in your relationship with them.
CREATION
During the creation stage, you are converting your audience into purchasing clients. This stage of the client journey is when you are signing contracts (touchpoint), handing out onboarding packages (touchpoint), getting your invoices paid (touchpoint), and talking with your client on a regular basis.
Every single interaction you have with your clients is a touchpoint. This includes your workflows, as mentioned above, as well as any other interactions you have with them such as emails, private messages, zoom calls, product delivery, and so on. How you interact during these steps and how each of these interactions looks describes your touchpoint.
NEXT STEPS
Once you are done with your client's work, all invoices are paid, all products are delivered, and the contract is closed... what happens next? For some brands, these steps are more important than the ones in the discovery stage. Can you guess why?
"Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%. The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%."
You can read more stats like this here, but the general idea is that it is easier to have clients coming back to you than to keep finding new ones. This means, skipping the first three stages of the client journey! A lot fewer touchpoints and interactions, because you've already gone over everything.
Some examples of touchpoints that come at this stage are follow-ups to the projects, offboarding packages, and regular communication with them through standard channels such as private messages, emails, etc. What you say here and how open you are will help convert these closed clients into repeat clients.
WHAT KIND OF AN IMPACT DOES A TOUCHPOINT HAVE ON YOUR BRAND?
Every single touchpoint has an impact on your brand. Whether you are asking people to like your social media post, give you their email for a freebie, register for your course, sign a contract, or write a testimonial. The way you interact with your audience at every stage of their client journey has an impact on your brand. This is why your workflows and client journeys are as important to your brand as your visuals, if not more so!
If you use the wrong colour on your social media post, you are not going to lose a client. But if your contract is filled with mistakes and weird clauses, you may. If your freebie delivery isn't instantaneous you may not lose that lead, but if you don't deliver what you advertised, you probably won't hear from that person again.
Every single interaction is a touchpoint. And every single touchpoint tells your audience how you work and if they want to become clients. Remember, a brand is more than a logo. It is how you talk to your audience, how you sign your clients, and how every touchpoint builds on their experience with you, from start to finish.