The Touch Process: Your Digital Touches

Author: Rachel Durkan Category: B2B, B2C, Digital & Social Media, Marketing, Nonprofit, Retail Date: January 5, 2017

By now you know that it takes 7-9 touches to reach your target audience. These touches can range from an e-mail to a magazine advertisement to a digital ad on a website. They encompass both online and offline marketing and advertising techniques. Even your website itself should be part of the touch process. You should be incorporating your touches into a comprehensive marketing plan to ensure you are communicating your value propositions and differentiators as well as reinforcing your expertise.

Some of the touches are online and some are offline. We discussed how to incorporate traditional media into your touch process such as television advertisements, press releases and advertisements in publications. As our society becomes more mobile and more digital, it is extremely important to ensure that you have a few different digital touches in the marketing process.

Marketing Online: The Digital Touch

The digital world is here and it’s almost always the best way to reach your target audience, save for a few audiences. Every single one of your touches should direct people to your website. This reinforces the idea that your website should be a marketing tool itself. Let’s talk about what the different opportunities you have to ‘touch’ your audience and send them to your website.

E-Mail Marketing

E-mail has been a decades old way of communicating, but it is not dead. It is just another touch in the marketing process. E-mail is extremely more effective if coupled with a marketing campaign and multiple touch points, so don’t expect to see big responses with a stand alone e-mail.

If a monthly e-newsletter is part of your marketing plan, continue to do that. This will enable you to get information into your audience’s hands. But, if you have something important coming up that would require a campaign, or you have decided that you want to push a particular service that you offer, then you should consider integrating an e-mail communication with other touch points.

Social Media Marketing

You can create multiple touches with social media marketing, but you really need to know your audience. Understanding which social media platforms your audience exists on is crucial to a successful social media touch point. On many social media platforms, you have two options to choose from: organic or paid posts.

Organic posts mean that you are posting to whomever wants to follow you: your friends, followers, connections. A paid post is an advertisement, essentially. You can choose your target audience and pay by click or by one thousand impressions. You can choose what your main goal is (i.e. to send visitors to a landing page on your website, to increase ‘likes’ to your page, to get people to sign up for an event, etc), so it is important to know what your goal is before publishing your post.

Inbound Marketing Links

There are many opportunities to post advertisements on the Internet. When deciding to implement an inbound marketing campaign, you’ll want to ensure that you know where your target audience is on the Internet. It does not make sense to advertise your business on a gardening website if your target audience lives in a high rise in the middle of New York City. As with all other campaigns, you must determine what the goal is for your campaign. You should be directing users to a landing page that identifies what it is you are advertising. If you want to advertise a service you offer, you should make sure your advertisement directs users to a landing page about that service. Once they land on the page, you should have a very clear call-to-action. This can be something as simple as a contact form, an e-mail newsletter sign-up, or an application of some sort.

Resource Download

Once your audience finds your website, whether through an online or offline touch point, you want to ensure that your website offers them something of value. A downloadable resource is a great place to start. You can capture contact information by offering this download, and you are able to track conversions and follow-up with those that do download your resource. Your next touch point could be an e-mail or even a phone call.

These are just a few options of touch points in the marketing process that incorporate digital means. By incorporating these digital points to your offline touches, you can create a robust marketing campaign that enables you to touch your audience 7-9 times. If you have any questions about these touch points, contact a Paradigm Marketing and Design team member at info@paradigm-md.com or (973) 250-4995.