I’ve been learning a lot lately about marketing technology.  It’s fascinating and scary. I recently had a lesson on the digital metric “last touch” before a sale. The lead attributed to the platform where a “conversion” (sale) was made. The cool thing about this metric is it acknowledges there is a continuum of touches leading up to a sale.

This is great for ecommerce plays but gets a little hinky for retail. A decade or so ago, I came up with a customer journey-esque rigor I called Twitch Point Planning.  A Twitch being a media move from one platform or device to another. An example would be a Twitch from an Inc. Magazine story on the tech scene in Asheville, to a Google search for “Asheville Technology Companies.” This Twitch could happen all on an iPhone or if could take place while listening to NPR in the car, followed by a Twitch to a mobile phone search. Twitches are serial touches. And hopefully trackable.

The goal of Twitch Point Planning is to move a customer closer to a sale.  In other words, we are not just focusing on the last touch, but on all touches in the queue. We are good with last touch but not so much the serial bread crumb trail. Modeling the rest of the funnel is what martech (marketing technology) is all about.

The fact that we are talking about it is exciting. The fact that some companies are investing 90% of their marketing budgets on the last touch (Google/Facebook), though, is startlingly shortsighted.

Peace.