Why you should take care of your digital touchpoints
Have you tried to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and stakeholders? The internet is a place where customers and stakeholders can interact with your brand at many places: social media, apps, websites, portals, blog posts, and so on. One second-rate experience and you’re likely to lose your brand image in a matter of a few minutes.
In this article, let’s have a closer look at the importance of digital touchpoints. Plus, why do you need to emphasize each touchpoint for offering optimum brand experience to all company stakeholders?
PWC found that 32% of the customers would leave a brand they loved after just one bad experience.
What is a digital touchpoint?
A digital touchpoint is a channel-specific interaction between a customer or a stakeholder with a brand. Whether a prospect visits your social media page or comes across your business’s review on a review platform, it’s an example of a digital touchpoint. A digital touchpoint has the potential to impact what a customer or a stakeholder feels about your brand.
Why are digital touchpoints critical?
Imagine a prospect visiting your website, typing a message in the live chat box, and not getting any reply. Can you feel the agony of a customer visiting your e-store and finding the wrong product images?
Think about an agency partner sending an email requesting the latest version of your brand logo and getting a reply after two days.
All these are digital touchpoints or brand interactions. But, unfortunately, trashy experiences on digital touchpoints can take your brand reputation down the drain. That’s why you need to ensure that each online brand experience is nothing short of impeccable.
And that’s the reason why digital touchpoints are an integral part of your digital brand experience strategy.
How to create engagement on each customer touchpoint?
Every customer goes through various stages in their buying journey. From being a stranger to the company to being a loyal customer, she comes across many touch-points that convince her to purchase.
How do you ensure that each touch-point is a delightful experience for your target customers?
Create a map of your ideal customer journey to understand the touch-points that matter most to your business.
Make each interaction consistent with your brand’s core values.
Offer a personalized experience to prospects, customers, and stakeholders.
Use customer preference and feedback data to work on improving customer interactions on each touch-point.
Work diligently towards offering prompt and accurate replies to customer queries.
Engaging customers and stakeholders at each touchpoint is vital to a successful digital brand strategy.
Let’s now take a peek into how stakeholders play a crucial role in upholding your brand and disseminating the correct information to your prospects and customers.
Managing stakeholder engagement
Stakeholders play a significant role in the brand-building process. That’s why managing stakeholder touch-points is vital.
In this section, let’s learn about the importance of on-brand and personalized communication for different stakeholders associated with an organization.
Agencies and Distributors
Most businesses scaling up their marketing efforts end up working with many agencies, including digital agencies, advertising partners, and PR agencies.
- To ensure that an agency partner is maintaining brand standards with each of your marketing campaigns, you must meet their informational needs at all times.
- For instance, as a CMO, it’s your responsibility to ensure that every agency has access to all the latest versions of product and service photographs along with brand logo files.
- Similarly, you need to make sure that all company distributors and sales partners can access suitable product presentations at the right time.
- Your agency partners should know how to present your brand to the target audience. That’s why they need to have easy access to your brand’s style guidelines.
Agencies play a central role in building and maintaining a brand. For this reason, you need to engage with your agency partners at all the relevant interaction points and ensure they are well-informed.
Employees
If you think carefully, you’ll realize that employees are an inseparable part of your brand culture. Each employee interacts with your brand on a day-to-day basis through multiple touchpoints.
Employee engagement for managing brand experiences
Also, by communicating your brand’s values with your employees, you can ensure they can follow brand principles in every customer interaction.
For instance, what if a sales representative did not understand your brand’s voice? She would not be able to replicate the same while talking with a prospective customer.
The same holds for internal customer service representatives.
Marketing leaders must ensure that sales representatives have the latest versions of product and company presentations.
Employees as internal stakeholders
In a way, employees are also your customers—internal customers. Getting potential and existing employees to engage with your brand is the best way to attract the right people to your organization. The same holds for employee retention.
For instance, can you imagine a team training presentation that’s devoid of your brand logo and colors?
As a CMO, you need to ensure that all functional heads can access your brand guidelines and all the branded content assets.
This way, you can ensure synchronized internal communications by engaging with your employees and ensuring they have in-depth brand knowledge.
Investors and shareholders
A successful brand works towards meeting the needs of all stakeholders. But, of course, it goes without saying that running a successful business is also about winning the trust of your investors and shareholders.
- Make sure you update them about the latest developments in your company—upcoming goals, product updates, and so on.
- A good way is to ensure that each investor interaction is on-brand and geared to satisfy their informational needs.
Creating the relevant content for each touchpoint is the prime way to build investor confidence about your products and services.
The road towards a consistent brand experience across touchpoints
In a world of myriad digital touchpoints, the hardest thing for a brand manager is to manage stakeholders’ expectations across all touchpoints.
The first step is to map all touchpoints that matter to your customers and stakeholders.
You then need to create a standardized brand experience for each touchpoint.
Does it sound like a lot of work?
In the next section, let’s understand how you can use a content portal to simplify a large part of your digital touchpoint strategy.
Embracing content portals
Most CMOs get sleepless nights getting internal and external stakeholders to understand and follow a company’s brand guidelines. And that’s the most critical aspect of ensuring that each digital touchpoint is on-brand.
With Smint.io Portals, you can create a single source of truth for your brand. A resource center to store all your brand content assets in a single location. Our solutions help you to:
- Let all stakeholders access the relevant branded content assets along with the guidelines on using those content assets.
- Manage users and permissions to ensure that you have complete control of how each content asset is being used in internal and external communications.
Unlike other content portal solutions, which are complex, expensive, and require you to have technical knowledge, Smint.io Portals is a:
- Simple, cost-effective, ready-to-use, and customizable solution.
Do you have further questions?
You have the questions – we have the answers.
