Marketing touches

What is a marketing touch?

A marketing touch is any interaction between your brand and a potential customer. These points of contact occur throughout the buyer's journey and can take many forms—from a prospect seeing your social media post to receiving an email, watching your video, or speaking with your sales representative. Marketing touches build familiarity with your brand over time, gradually moving prospects toward conversion. Each touch serves as an opportunity to deliver value, address concerns, and strengthen your relationship with potential customers.

How do marketing touches work in the customer journey?

Marketing touches create a connected experience across the customer journey. Early touches typically focus on awareness and education—like blog posts, social content, or display ads that introduce your brand to new prospects. Middle-journey touches deepen engagement through webinars, case studies, or remarketing campaigns that address specific pain points. Late-stage touches facilitate conversion through product demos, consultations, or limited-time offers. These touchpoints work together, creating a cohesive path that guides prospects from initial awareness to becoming customers. The most effective journeys blend digital touches (emails, ads, website visits) with physical ones (direct mail, events) and balance automated touches with personalized human interactions.

Why are multiple marketing touches important?

Research consistently shows that prospects need multiple exposures to your brand before making a purchase decision—often seven or more touches. This "rule of seven" exists because trust develops gradually. Initial touches create awareness, while subsequent interactions build credibility and emotional connection. Multiple touches also account for timing—a prospect might not need your solution when they first encounter your brand but remember you months later when a need arises. By maintaining consistent, valuable touches, you remain top-of-mind when the prospect is ready to buy. This reality makes single-touch marketing strategies ineffective for all but the simplest purchases and explains why integrated, multi-channel campaigns consistently outperform isolated efforts.

How do you track and measure marketing touches?

Tracking marketing touches requires both technology and thoughtful attribution models. Most companies use a combination of marketing automation platforms, CRM systems, and analytics tools to capture touch data. Multi-touch attribution models distribute conversion credit across various touchpoints—from first-touch (giving credit to the initial interaction) to last-touch (crediting the final interaction before conversion) or weighted models that recognize the varying importance of different touches. Advanced approaches include time-decay attribution (giving more credit to recent touches) and algorithmic models that use machine learning to determine touch influence. The right tracking approach depends on your sales cycle length, channel mix, and business model, but should always connect touches to meaningful business outcomes like revenue, not just intermediate metrics.

How can you optimize your marketing touches?

Optimizing marketing touches starts with understanding your audience's preferences and behaviors. Analyze which touches drive engagement at each journey stage and double down on high-performing formats and channels. Personalization significantly improves touch effectiveness—tailor content based on industry, role, previous interactions, and stage in the buying process. Timing matters too; space touches appropriately (frequent enough to maintain awareness but not so frequent they become annoying), and coordinate across channels for a coherent experience. Consider touch sequencing—certain touches work better after others have established context. Finally, maintain consistent messaging across touches while varying format and depth to address different learning styles and information needs as prospects move toward a decision.