Boost Your Sales Using Touch Points

Once upon a time not so long ago, if you wanted to get in touch with a company you looked up their number in a phone book and gave them a call or if they had an office nearby, you went and called in person.

Today things are no longer so simple and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are more touch points between company and customer than ever before and new ones are constantly spawning - think mobile and social as two extensive categories.

While this does have the potential for confusion, the customer is usually seen to be the one getting the most benefit from this as they’re now able to get a massive amount of information before even contacting the company and making a purchasing decision.

However, forward-thinking companies and individuals are also capitalizing on this change and in doing so creating revenue opportunities (think social selling) by enhancing the customer experience at each touch point; they’re engaging customers across multiple social, blogs, website, chat, mail, email, 3rd party media, ads and much more - in a way that fits the medium and connects with the demographic.

While not every company and individual has the budget and/or resources to cover let alone keep up with these constantly expanding touch points, there is no sign that this will slow down any time soon.

So how, as individuals in any-sized organization, can we take full advantage of touch points to increase sales?

1. What touch points can you cover?

Big marketing departments have many options open to them, but even sales individuals, one-person or small marketing teams can maintain several touch points. Choose which ones fit your brand (self and company) and where you’re going to get the most prospects.

If you’re not already using a couple of social channels already, then it’s as good a place as any to start. Beyond that, regular blogging, webinars and/or posting articles to trade magazines can keep you and your company top of mind. If you run a small business do you have an active chat application on your site? Are you sending out surveys to get feedback? Sending newsletters to your current contacts, if you’re not already sending these out, should also be considered. Not self-congratulatory messages, but ideally 3rd party news or statistics or insights which might genuinely help them. 

The aim with whichever channels you ultimately go with, should be to be easily searchable and to be adding value at each selected touch point.

2. Think ‘conversations’ rather than ‘stories’ 

Although stories are important (and I mention this in my previous post), what is more important with touch points are conversations. This is connected to the above point of adding value. Prospective customers are not interested in how great you or your company are, but they are interested in what insights you can offer and how you might be able to help them.

So, for all the touch points you're connected on, make sure you’re offering value and then engaging with those who get back to you, commenting, replying and so on. Set up alerts to get information on the industries, companies, individuals, etc that you're focused on and use this to help boost your conversations.

The better you engage the more likely you are to both become an authority in the eyes of the prospect and win new business.

3. Automate     

This can often be a dirty word associated with a lack of personalization - the very thing we’re trying to avoid and spam is synonymous with automation of this kind, but if you’re just blasting off messages to prospects you don’t know or who wouldn't be a good fit then you've really got to go back to steps 1 through 2.

Emailing prospects and/or current customers is mostly only possible through automation. Keeping your social media feeds up-to-date and relevant is only really possible with automation, unless you don’t plan on sleeping…

This doesn't mean you just ‘set it and forget it’, but rather that you set it, you monitor it and you engage with those who who interest - those who open your emails for example, or click on a link or those who retweet or repost your social messages.

Remember, your future customer is on a journey too and if you can help guide them through it towards your solution (provided it is the best for them), then everyone wins - apart from your competition...

4. Review 

You should always be looking for which types of engagement are working best for you and focusing on them. For example, perhaps you’re a quota-carrying salesperson and you’re on Twitter for 30 mins a day looking for prospects, tweeting, mentioning etc to show how your products/services could help these individuals. Yet, when you look back over a specific time period at how many of these prospects actually entered your pipeline or became customers and you find the number is very low, then perhaps it’s time to find a different touch point to focus on.

Or another example could be LinkedIn, perhaps your Pulse articles get very low engagement, but your insights offered to groups get good feedback, then you know where to focus your engagement efforts.

Get to understand your customers and which touch points they like to connect on as well as you possibly can and you'll be rewarding both yourself and your customer.

To learn how organizations are engaging better with their customers using a combination of SEO and marketing automation, check out this eBook: