Your audience will interact with your business in several ways before making a purchase or employing your services. These are known as ‘touchpoints’, and understanding them can help marketers track the customer journey to inform future campaigns.
Before we explain the multi-touch model, let’s take a moment to unpick two distinct points in the customer journey businesses often focus on.
- First-Touch: This is the first time someone interacts with your business or brand, in real life or online. Once a company identifies trends in how its target audience initially engages with it, it can focus on driving marketing efforts toward those channels.
- Last-Touch: Conversely, the last-touch model assesses the last interaction someone had with your business before deciding to become a customer. It can be a powerful way of identifying the most effective triggers for onboarding new customers or clients, thereby pinpointing where to allocate resources.
Introducing the Multi-Touch Model
While the models above can provide some fantastic campaign insights, a lot happens between a customer’s first and final interaction with your brand. By connecting the dots, you’ll get a clearer picture of how and why a campaign works and where it could go wrong.
With this in mind, let’s look at a few common touchpoints that can illuminate what’s happening from start to finish.
- Exposure: How did users first find you? Which channels did they use? For example, social media, blog posts, or organic search results.
- Early conversions: What form of marketing led to the most interactions? For example, did paid ads or organic search bring the most results?
- Relation between first and last touch: Does the channel or method a customer first interacts with your brand determine the likelihood that they’ll take other actions, such as subscribing to a newsletter or responding to an offer, finally leading to a purchase? What impact does this difference have on your overall ROI?
- Analysing content: Is there a link between customers reading your content and later making a purchase? For example, do web visitors later loop back to buy from your business? Would they have done so if they hadn’t seen your content, such as blog posts and articles, first?
Once you can answer these fundamental questions, you’ll have a much fuller understanding of how your customers progress through the buying journey and why some are more likely to reach the end than others.
You may discover that attracting customers organically through high-ranking informative content leads to better long-term results across your various channels, from socials to email marketing, then certain types of ads – or maybe not. The only way to know for sure is by incorporating the multi-touch approach into your data collection and analysis strategy.
