How does your audience respond?

Points of choice are where your audiences respond to your message or brand. Where they choose to take action … to click through, call, refer, enroll, recommend, join or buy.

The point of choice is the culmination of all of your marketing tactics because it’s where you drive response. It’s where your target audiences take action.

Each organization has its own points of choice

Each organization has unique messages, channels and audiences that produce different points of choice. An optimized brand identifies the most critical points of choice first — where your specific target audiences take action — then build from there.

By building your brand from the point of choice, you’ll create more impact. You’ll increase your return on investment.

It’s the difference between a general advertising message that might make a product name familiar, and a package that compels a shopper to pick it up, read the message, and put it in the cart.

Four levels of engagement

Attention, Interest, Demand and Action

As we define the brand program, each point of choice is prioritized through four levels of engagement. This strategy follows the sales process and ensures action at each contact with the audience. Current contacts are optimized while gaps are identified as new opportunities to create response.

Attention:

• Be seen and recognized.
• Stand out so people want to know more.
• Ensure the organization can be found online.

Interest:

• Reinforce benefits to keep audiences moving to the next level.
• Ensure the brand is clearly different from the competition.
• Create memorable design elements that are consistent amongst contacts, to build more interest.

Demand:

• Create demand with testimonials and comparisons.
• Reinforce “what’s in it for me?” from the audiences’ point of view.
• Provide a clear call to action, define the next steps, and provide links to learn more.

Action:

• Ensure it’s easy to order, buy, and sign on. All steps are clear and simple.
• Validate the benefits again; communicate clearly what happens after the action is taken.
• Provide all of the information needed to make a decision.

Followed by Retention

Once the final choice is made — to buy, enroll, join or sign up — it’s time to foster an ongoing relationship. The goal is to create fans that recommend, produce additional sales and spread the word.

Identify where your audiences share thoughts or provide feedback — social media, blogs, networking, groups — to guide the points of choice for ongoing retention and to support new connections, relationships and purchases.

Once the points of choice are defined, we address strategic definition to define how the brand fits in the market and what audiences can count on; positioning then builds on the strategic definition by creating messages and a visual identity system; implementation brings the brand to life at the points of choice and supports the communication and sales process; internal adoption ensures those who live the brand — your staff — have the tools and training they need.

One essential point of choice is packaging. Check out some examples of our packaging design.

What are your critical points of choice? Check out our point of choice worksheet to identify where your audiences take action, where you can leverage the connections you already have.