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Brand Touchpoints

What is a brand touchpoint, and how can they benefit your business?

Business is booming. As we find ourselves more immersed with the companies we love, the term ‘brand‘ seems to be appearing more and more often. Long gone are the days of the most influential brands finding a home on every street corner, now they’re taking every inch of free space on our computer screens too.

Businesses fight for real estate as they have realised the value of being seen (online or in person) is more important than ever before. In this blog, we are talking about brand Touchpoints whilst walking you step by step through a branding journey.

We will take a detour along the way to highlight how Brand Touchpoints can help your business and why you should be thinking about building relationships through your branding.

What are brand touchpoints?

If you haven’t heard the terminology ‘brand touchpoint’ before, don’t worry because it’s likely that you’ll know at least one without even knowing it! As is often the case with the digital world, you can easily get lost in the technical jargon, and that’s not ideal.

Essentially, brand touchpoints are anything that comes into contact with your audience. Everything from your website to your business cards is included. However, there is a much more important value behind brand touchpoints that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Your social media feeds and your website is what’s called surface level touchpoints. They allow your business to make an initial interaction with a potential client and are pivotal when establishing who you are as a brand.

However, if you are looking to create meaningful relationships with your potential audience, it’s time to start thinking about brand touchpoints with a little more intent.

Why do you need to know about brand touchpoints?

There are plenty of reasons why you need to know all about your brand touchpoints. When it comes to improving your audience’s experience with your brand, it’s virtually impossible if you don’t have knowledge of your brand touchpoints. If you don’t know what they are or where they are placed, you’ll never be able to tweak your touchpoints accurately to build a more wholesome relationship with your customers or clients.

If you are particularly savvy in the design department or hire an external graphics expert, understanding all your touchpoints can significantly increase your chance of success.

Designers can manipulate your brand’s marketing for each of your touchpoints. For example, suppose your business drives sales through both a mobile-based app interface and an eCommerce website. In that case, data shows that the customers who visit you on a mobile device are more likely to be distracted and exit your platform. Because of this, it becomes essential that your application is designed in a way that the user can return to their experience with your brand. In contrast, the touchpoints on your website can be designed to keep the attention of potential customers and draw them in, keep them interested.

Brand touchpoints and Create8

To fully leverage all the touchpoints available to your brand, you must have someone on your side that can produce excellent content. That’s where we come in!

As a graphic design and branding agency, we specialise in helping push your brand into the limelight. Our experience within the branding sector allows us to provide an unrivalled service and means you don’t have to make the mistakes that we’ve already witnessed.

Understanding how touchpoints work and how to manipulate your branding to suit every occasion is one of the many challenges we take on weekly. So, if you’re looking for someone to help your business along the often arduous journey, give us a call.

Managing your touchpoints

Once you fully understand what your touchpoints are and where they happen, the next question is how do you manage them all? Well, without trying to state the obvious, the bigger your business is, the more touchpoints you will have.

Suppose you are a company that offers a limited number of products. In that case, your design team will be able to focus on the most integral touchpoints solely, for example, your social media feed, the usability of your website and the design of your packaging or hard copy marketing.

However, if you are a company with an endless number of touchpoints, it becomes integral to plan out these touchpoints to create an overview of your user journey. From initial interaction all the way through to purchase. This way, you address your touchpoints as a process and not individual nuggets of branding.

What is expected of your brand’s touchpoints?

So here’s the exciting thing about brand touchpoints, due to the extensive research into the marketing sector, we can understand how your audience will likely interact with your touchpoints.

Endearing interactions – Your audience interacts with your brand from a touchpoint that implies desirability for your product.

Relevant interactions – How relevant or usable your product is allows your brand to create bonds with your audience as it fulfils a need within their lives.

Appropriate interactions – If your brand touchpoint aligns with the immediate needs of your audience, both culturally and morally, it creates an appropriate bond with them.

Meaningful interactions – If your brand presents itself as having added depth or value, your audience will deem the touchpoint to be increasingly meaningful.

It’s vital to remember that although the character of your brand will largely dictate the interactions you have with your audience. Your touchpoints can be designed to evoke the sentiment you are looking for; however, before you elect one form of interaction over the other, we would advise tackling some research into your audience and demographic.

Are there any touchpoints that are out of your control?

There are a small number of touchpoints that fall entirely out of your control. However, with effective management of these touchpoints, you can exercise some thought over them. For example, the reviews that your customers leave online are not something that you can specifically manipulate. However, with an effective process for collecting and storing reviews, you may be able to overshadow any nasty ones that may occur. If someone aims to troll or target your business, being well prepared to prove that they are false will also help you in your quest to remove them in the long run.

When to start thinking about brand touchpoints?

NOW. Start thinking about them right away if you haven’t already! All of the initial touchpoints you strategically choose to make should have been assessed in your brand package. If they weren’t, we suggest stepping away from your marketing and making a note of where and when your business interacts with potential customers. Is it on their daily commute, in their lunch break, as they tap around the internet from their bed late at night? Where can you start making an impression?

Name a brand that you love… We will give you a minute.

Let’s go with Apple! OK, so when you think of Apple, your thoughts will primarily be based on your experience and interactions with the brand. As Apple iPhone users, we immediately think of technology; we think of sharp, sleek designs, opening the packaging and it being truly satisfying. Oddly it can also make you think of cleanliness, the star white shops with no clutter, their clean white boxes and packaging.

Here’s the interesting part, what touchpoint does that term ‘cleanliness’ come from? Or could it be that as a brand, Apple aims to evoke that emotion within us? Think of this; the designs of their products are clean, the layout of IOS, yup, that’s clean too, the store and the staff’s uniform, yes you guessed it, clean!

The next question would be, despite not being a specifically technology based term, is ‘clean’ something that Apple is looking for? The evidence would say, yes, of course, it is! It’s a positive word that runs throughout their brand touchpoints, thus highlighting that audience knowledge and outside-the-box thinking and design work can create something brilliant.

The Apple example above evokes thought around the idea of brand touchpoints, highlighting that with the right amount of audience knowledge, your business can create several valuable bonds with potential customers. The size of your company can make understanding your touchpoints a little long-winded, but it also means that you can structure an entire user journey around those touchpoints.

The key to understanding your brand touchpoints is knowing where and when they take place. Once you obtain that knowledge, you are then able to manipulate them in such a way that your brand can build lifelong bonds with your customers.

We must stress, don’t forget the smaller, seemingly less meaningful touchpoints, such as the pens with your branding on them or the way your business cards feel to touch. These are the delicate touches that supplement the way your eCommerce website feels or the way your staff treat customers to create something truly meaningful.

If you’re looking to build an unforgettable brand yourself, at Create8, we are a team of savvy branding experts waiting for your call.

Take a look at some more of our blogs for helpful tips, tricks and advice:

  • How to Extend Your Brand to Your Website
  • Brand Refresh in 2022
  • How to Make My Brand Consistent

The post Brand Touchpoints appeared first on Create8.



This post first appeared on Create 8 - Our Voice, please read the originial post: here

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