What are Multi-Touch Marketing Strategies? A How-To Guide
The digital landscape nowadays is quick and that means that effectively reaching your target audience takes more effort than ever before.
You can’t hang all of your hopes on a single marketing strategy. Instead, if you want your marketing efforts to pay dividends, you really need to think more in terms of multi-touch marketing strategies. Essentially, this means that instead of focusing all of your effort and outreach on just one attempt to reach your audience, you’ll incorporate a mix of touchpoints designed to reach your audience in a wide variety of ways, giving you a better chance of breaking through, leaving a lasting impressing, and getting the results you’re looking for.
Here, we’re breaking down what multi-touch marketing looks like, why it matters, and how you can make it work for you.
What Are Multi-Touch Marketing Strategies?
Multi-touch marketing strategies require businesses to interact with potential customers and their target audience across a number of different channels and at various points throughout their journey. Essentially, it’s a big name for trying to reach the audience in lots of ways. This could include email marketing, social media, paid ads, texts, or even mail. The thought process is that trying to reach your target audience in multiple ways and at multiple stages can boost the odds that you’ll get the results you want.
Traditional marketing campaigns usually involve a single channel, but multi-touch campaigns utilize many different platforms that are meant to complement each other. This helps nurture your leads and keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience. The hope is that this approach can help guide them through the sales funnel and drive conversions.
Why We Love Multi-Touch Marketing Strategies
Multi-touch marketing strategies have some real upsides. Here’s why we love them so much:
Boosted brand visibility: Because your target audience is going to use different platforms and will likely have different preferences for how they interact with you, using multi-touch strategies means you have more opportunities to grab your audience’s attention and keep it.
Better engagement: If you reach your customers where they prefer to interact with you, you have a better chance of providing value to them and building a solid relationship with them. Tell your story on social, via email, and more so that they get a well-rounded picture and can engage with you in their preferred way.
Better conversion rates: The more chances your audience has to interact with your brand, the more likely they are to convert. Multiple touchpoints means more of these chances for engagement and a higher likelihood of making a purchase.
Increased ROI: Using multi-touch marketing strategies prevents you from relying on just one form of marketing. Because of that, you spread not only your risk around (if one form doesn’t work as well as others), but also gives you a better chance of landing on a strategy that does work.
How to Create a Solid Multi-Touch Marketing Strategy
Pulling together a marketing strategy that leads to results takes skill and expertise. Here are a few things you’ll need to keep in mind if you want a powerhouse multi-touch marketing strategy:
Get clear on your customer's journey
Before you plan out a clear marketing strategy or make any firm decisions, you’ll want to make sure that you understand the journey that customers take when interacting with your brand. Determine the most important touchpoints that customers have with your brand—whether social media content, paid ads, email marketing, website visits, blog posts, and more—so that you can better and more effectively reach the right people on each platform. You can get user-level data that'll give you valuable insights for later campaigns.
Think about different channels
Multi-touch marketing does best when you put different marketing channels to work for you. Think about using email marketing to send personalized and segmented emails that will reach clients at their point in the buyer's journey, social media ads, posts, influencer partnerships, content marketing with blog posts and videos, pay-per-click ads, and more. Leave nothing completely off the table.
Make everything personalized
Although it’s more work, you can’t rely on generalized outreach when you’re implementing a multi-touch strategy. Make sure that you do your best to personalize the messaging at each touchpoint. Think about which part of your audience you’re engaging with, what they’re interested in, what kinds of messages are most relevant for them, and where they are in their customer journey.
Make automation work for you
Though you might be hesitant at first if you’re used to doing things on your own, but automation can really help you level up your marketing efforts. Marketing automation tools (like Manychat on social media or Hubspot with emails) can help you create a leaner and more efficient multi-touch strategy. You can create workflows that send emails, texts, and other notifications based on the ways that users interact with you.
These kinds of tools make it easier for your marketing team to keep on top of interactions so that you can quickly and relevantly engage with your audience without the need to have someone constantly monitoring everything and responding accordingly. These tools can add a lot of value and make multi-touch marketing a lot less complicated and overwhelming.
Track and analyze the results of your efforts
You’ll want to make sure you monitor the performance of your marketing efforts as you implement your wider strategy. Nearly every single platform that you could use to execute your strategy will track performance and give you access to analytics and metrics.
Use the tools available to you to help you determine which marketing touchpoints are working the best and leading the most engagement and conversions. Once you understand which parts of your strategy are performing best, you can make data-driven decisions and tailor and refine your plans to maximize your impact.
Examples of Who Can Use Multi-Touch Marketing—And How to Make It Work for You
Although multi-touch marketing strategies are applicable to tons of different kinds of businesses, here are a few examples of strategies and various touchpoints that could work well for these types:
An e-commerce B2C business: While scrolling on Instagram, a customer clicks on a partnership post with one of their favorite influencers. They open the affiliate platform the influencer uses and click through, but don’t buy. Then, they see one of your paid ads while scrolling through Instagram or Instagram Stories. They get retargeted on another site later on, and receive a reminder email offering them a discount code to further grab their interest.
A B2B business: A lead visits your website and downloads a lead magnet. They receive a follow-up email with a relevant case study and regular emails that you send out to all prospective customers. They’re invited to book a short call to see how you can help.
FAQs
What are the benefits of multi-touch marketing strategies?
Multi-touch marketing strategies are great tools for those looking to expand their digital marketing efforts. Because you’re reaching out to your audience in various ways, across various channels and touchpoints, you have a better chance of getting results and less risk. Multi-touch marketing boosts brand awareness, can increase customer engagement and loyalty by nurturing relationships, and can help increase your conversion rates because it guides your audience through their entire buyer journey.
How many specific touchpoints should a good multi-touch marketing strategy have?
Multi-touch marketing strategies, by nature, have multiple ways that you’re reaching out to and interacting with your customers and target audience. The exact number of different touchpoints your multi-touch marketing strategy should have depends on a lot of different factors. What’s most important is that you create touchpoints that are high-value and relevant to your audience. Make each touchpoint meaningful and do your best to guide your customers through the process, best aligning with where they are at that point in time.
What’s the difference between multi-touch marketing and multi-channel marketing?
They’re super similar, but not exactly the same. Multi-touch marketing emphasizes engaging customers on a progression of interactions or touchpoints. Multi-channel marketing is just about the various platforms like email, social media, direct mail, and ads that you use to market to customers. Multi-touch marketing is linked to the journey your customers are on, while multi-channel marketing is solely about the different channels you choose to use. These strategies can work together, but with multi-touch marketing, the messaging customers are getting through various channels are complementary. With single-touch models, the messaging doesn't need to go together. What you put in a Facebook ad, Google ads, or email campaigns can all be different.
Which channels should I use for my multi-touch marketing strategy?
The best channels to use for your multi-touch marketing efforts are going to be different for different companies. Start by analyzing your audience and understanding where they interact with you. Do you have a loyal community on social media, for instance? Knowing where your audience already likes to hang out and understanding how they want to interact with you is key to getting results.
It’s also a good idea to consider which channels best help you accomplish your business goals. If you work primarily with other businesses, LinkedIn and email might be better fits for you (though if you’re working with brands with a heavy social media presence, that could be a good channel too). B2C brands might like Meta ads, paid search ads, and email.
Which metrics and key performance indicators should you monitor with multi-touch marketing strategy?
Tracking your marketing performance metrics is so important so that you can determine if you need to adjust your approach. Here’s what you should keep an eye on:
Engagement rates: Things like clicks, open rates, likes, comments, and share can all give you an idea of how your audience likes or dislikes your messaging and approach.
Conversion rates: Of course, what you really want are more conversions, so keeping track of conversion rates can help you tell what’s landing and what’s not.
Attribution models: These kinds of metrics help you determine which of your touchpoints are most effective in getting real results.
Customer lifetime value: Multi-touch marketing strategies can help boost customer loyalty long-term, which means watching this metric can help you determine if your efforts are effective.
How do I make a multi-touch marketing strategy personal?
Marketing strategies that personalize the message can be extremely effective, but when you’re working with so many different channels and touchpoints, how do you keep the personalization? Everything that you already know about your audience and customer interactions is a good starting point. Take a data-driven approach. Work to create personalized content for various buckets of customers. Offer discounts and incentives that align with their preferences, share product recommendations, and more. You can use marketing automation tools to help make this personalization process a bit less complex.
What are some multi-touch marketing mistakes to avoid?
You’re investing a lot of time and effort into developing and implementing a multi-touch marketing strategy. You don’t want to make unnecessary or common mistakes. Here’s what to watch out for:
Doing too much: If you try to spring too many touchpoints on your audience in a short period of time, you may find that it actually backfires on you, making it more likely that your customers will feel frustrated or irritated with your efforts. You want an easy breezy approach, not an overwhelming one.
Confusing messaging: Part of what sets multi-touch marketing apart from multi-channel marketing is a connected, consistent message across all touchpoints. If you’re sharing different messaging or messages written in different brand voices, it’ll confuse customers. The entire customer journey should have messaging that goes together.
Ignoring the data: You can’t possibly know if your strategy is working or not if you aren’t tracking and analyzing the data. When you keep an eye on the data, you can stick with what’s working and adjust anything that doesn’t seem to be driving results. Data-driven insights will give you better results.
Skipping segmentation: Treating all of your customers exactly the same isn’t a good idea—it means that some of your audience will be getting messages that don’t apply to them. You always want to provide value, so dividing your customers up into groups and tailoring the messaging accordingly can help ensure everything stays relevant.
How can I automate my multi-touch marketing?
There are plenty of marketing automation tools available if you’re looking to streamline your execution. Automation tools allow you to set up flows that can trigger emails, social media messages, texts, and more based on user behavior. These kinds of tools can help you nurture leads without your whole team needing to spend all of their time monitoring and responding to user interactions (and keeping things customized).
How long should a multi-touch marketing campaign last?
There’s no exact equation that will tell you how long a multi-touch marketing campaign should last. Ultimately, the length of time your campaign should run depends on a number of factors, including your overall business and marketing goals, who your audience is, what consumer behavior looks like, and what your sales cycle looks like. If you have an exceptionally long sales cycle, you’ll likely need your campaign to run for longer, while if you have shorter sales cycles, you won’t need as much time for your campaign to do its job. Work to keep contact and engagement consistent without pushing too hard or letting the relationship die.
How cost-effective is multi-touch marketing?
Some multi-touch marketing strategies will require you to invest a little cash upfront, but over time, they can be really cost-effective. Because you’re thinking about how your messaging and the channels that you use complement each other and work together, you can make your marketing more effective without having to spend a ton of money on any one platform. Plus, since multi-touch marketing focuses on more interactions and engagements, you’ll typically get higher conversions and ROI, so it might be a strategy that’s really worth its cost.
Final Thoughts
Adopting multi-touch marketing strategies is essential in today’s competitive digital environment. By reaching your customers through a variety of touchpoints, you can increase engagement, improve brand recall, and drive higher conversions. Remember to personalize your outreach, use multiple channels, and track your performance to continually optimize your strategy. With the right approach, multi-touch marketing can lead to greater success and stronger customer relationships.
