How many times have you received a cold call or message from a recent LinkedIn connection, selling you a service your business clearly doesn’t need?
It’s annoying isn’t it? Feeling like you’re being forced along a customer journey towards making a purchase for something you just don’t need is irritating, and makes you feel like your time is being wasted. So why would you do the same to your customers?
People want to buy from real people. And not just real people, but people who are empathetic to their needs, and can point them in the directions of products and services that can meet these needs. Using digital media tools, how can we get your business to become that person for your customers?
It is widely believed that it takes 7 interactions with a potential client to convert them into a customer.
In this blog we’ll be exploring how 7 touchpoints can be implemented to boost your sales, by exploring an example company that we previously worked with. These 7 touchpoints can take any of the following formats:
- Engagement and interactions with a strong presence on social media platforms.
- Authentic eshot and email marketing communications.
- Blog posts featuring industry news and company updates, displayed on a branded website.
- Reaching out to organise a call or a meeting, whether online or face to face.
- Conducting a real-time conversation to close the deal and convert the sale.
These touch points will look different according to your company and what you’re hoping to offer your customers. But in order to make your touch points as effective as possible, these are the tools we think you need at your disposal.
- A strategy.
- A strong and identifiable presence on social media.
- A clear website.
- Ongoing email marketing communications.
- A cohesive process.
Creating a touch point strategy.
Establishing key touch points that don’t follow a well researched strategy is futile, running the risks of leading your customers in the wrong direction and away from your business. A key element of a strong touch point strategy is understanding the audience you’re trying to reach. You need to know where your target customers operate, and what kind of digital materials they’re going to respond to. For example, if you know you want to reach businesses and business owners, then your touch points should be concentrated on LinkedIn. Whereas if you’re trying to market to consumers directly, then platforms like Instagram or TikTok should form the basis of your strategy. Once you’ve got a key strategy in place, you’ll be able to access the right networks in the right places with the right content.
Growing your Social Media Presence.
Organically growing a strong social media presence isn’t something that can be grown overnight. It requires consistency, strong content, and a cohesive and clear brand messaging which is immediately recognisable throughout all of your posts. Online networking tools can be great for getting introduced to a new range of potential customers, helping you to make those all important first touch points along your customer journey map. Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram or LinkedIn, each social media platform holds a different value with your audience. If you haven’t already, create a business page on your social media platform of choice that reflects the branding and messaging of your business. Encourage your team members to actively engage with the content you post, as this will reinforce the human element and trust of your brand.
You also need to keep on top of the trends on these different platforms, and how this impacts the content you’ll be creating for the benefit of your customers. Particularly on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, trends vary from week to week, or even day to day. Dedicating sufficient time to being active on that platform yourself to get a sense for the trends and popular content is vital to developing a social media presence full of digital touch points.
Keeping your website refreshed and updated.
A website is a great tool for showcasing your key products and services. But a website is more than just a catalogue. It’s where your potential customers go to find out more about the brand they’re interested in, and you need to provide them with the material that meets this need. Make sure you keep your website updated with blog content that reflects what you do. Whether it’s celebrating the achievements of your team, adding your point of view on industry news, or giving your audience more information about the processes and context behind your business and its services, potential clients visit your website to find out more about YOU.
Getting to grips with email marketing.
We all check our emails multiple times every single day. We also have spam folders full of junk that either never gets looked at or just goes straight in the trash folder. So, creating effective email communications is about more than just sending out high quantities of newsletters. It’s about creating eshots and email content that you know is going to add value to your mailing list, saving your email from the dreaded ‘send to trash’ button. A segmented and clearly labelled audience is also a great way of connecting with existing and potential customers at every stage of the conversion process, helping you get the most value out of your email marketing tools and the digital touch points it can create.
Linking it all together to form a watertight process.
It’s no use investing the time, money and effort in maximising on all of these tools if they don’t work together, in cohesion, to get your customers moving in the direction you want them to. Again, this process will look different for each business, but spending your time mapping out an ideal customer journey map, and listing the tools that support each stage of the process is vital to creating a strong and cohesive touch point pipeline.
Case Study
Let’s take a look at how utilising 7 digital touch points helped a client of SJR Digital to regain contact with a lost customer.
Let’s call this client Company A. Company A is a manufacturing company, with over 40 years of business behind them. Throughout this time, they had developed a strong customer base. However, they lost a client because of the lack of interaction with Company A. It wasn’t anything to do with their quality of work, but the quality of their service instead. The relationship was lost, no work was done through that client for years.
Company A knew they were still doing great work, but they just weren’t doing anything about it or telling anyone about it. They also realised they weren’t investing enough in developing their online networks.
As a B2B company, they knew that developing a presence on LinkedIn would be the best way to address this. With a network of 33.6 million UK users, LinkedIn was a huge resource for them to connect with potential clients. So, they created a business page which reflected the brand and messaging of the company. Company A educated their teams on the importance of their LinkedIn presence, encouraging each of them to follow the page and interact with the company content being posted.
They refreshed their website to better reflect the story of the business, and added a page where they could add blogs and news about company updates. They then started using emailing tools in a proactive way to send e-shots to people on their mailing list. Whether this was prospective, actual, or previous clients, they used email marketing to send out useful and engaging content that they knew each audience would respond well to.
Once they had developed the tools that would help them implement their 7 Digital Marketing Touchpoints, the team were able to jump in with effective action. They followed these key stages:
- TOUCH 1: Used the credibility built from their linkedIn presence to make a connection request to the Operations Director within their lost client organisation. From here, they added the Operations Director onto their mailing list, taking them onto…
- TOUCH 2-4: Over the next few weeks, the Ops Director received 3 e-shots. These e-shots weren’t directly selling Company A’s products and services, but were instead focused on how their staff had vast experience in customer facing roles, and how they were dedicated to the production side of their role as well as the customer care responsibilities.
- TOUCH 5: Company A created a blog post echoing their e-shot content, talking about the hire of a new Customer Service Director and how the team was helping customers by streamlining their processes. This was then shared by the key team on Linkedin.
- TOUCH 6: Company A’s business Development Director kept in contact with the Ops Director and invited him along to meet the team.
- TOUCH 7: The Ops Director attended the meeting, where they discussed how they could work together in the future.
Following these 7 touch points, Company A soon received enquiries from this lost client organisation, which was closely followed by an order being placed.
Case studies and examples like this show the power of the 7 touch points and the effect it can have on your lead generation. Examining your lead generation pipeline, and ensuring that you have a minimum of 7 points of contact with a potential client before you expect them to buy your product or service is essential to having a healthy business pipeline.
Want to maximise the 7 touch points of your business?
Want to create a strategy around these 7 touch points but don’t know where to start?
We’ve created a free, 3 minute, online quiz that can help you analyse your existing lead generation pipeline and point out where your areas for improvement are.
If you want to find out more about what your 7 touch points should look like, take our Sales Scorecard Growth quiz.
Within your personalised results report, we’ll be able to recommend the steps you need to take to get your lead generation to the place you want it to be, in a way that’s right for you and your business.
