Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / How Customer Journey Maps Hide Your Best Touchpoints
Transcript
- Lucas: So you spend weeks mapping the customer journey. You've got the website visit, the demo request, the sales call, the trial sign-up, the purchase. It's a clean, linear flow. Looks great on a slide deck. But here's the problem — that map is probably missing the touchpoints that actually decide whether someone buys. Luna: You're talking about the stuff you don't control, right? Like review sites, social media threads, even what their colleague says over lunch. Lucas: Exactly. I call them 'ghost touchpoints' — interactions that happen completely outside your owned channels, yet heavily influence the buyer. And most companies ignore them because they can't track them in Google Analytics. Luna: So how do you even know they exist if you're not measuring them? Lucas: That's the challenge. But there are ways. Let me give you a concrete example. I was talking to a B2B SaaS company — they sell project management software to mid-market teams. Their official journey map started at 'search ad click' and ended at 'onboarding call.' Clean, right? But when they actually surveyed new customers asking 'what was the single most influential thing that made you choose us?' — the top answer wasn't the website, the demo, or the sales rep. Luna: What was it? Lucas: A Reddit thread. Specifically, a thread in r/projectmanagement where someone asked for recommendations. Their product was mentioned by three different commenters who weren't affiliated with the company. And 40% of new customers said that thread was the deciding factor. Luna: Forty percent? That's huge. And completely off their map. Lucas: Right. Their map showed a nice funnel from ad to trial. But the real funnel started with a Reddit search they had zero control over. And this isn't an anomaly. I've seen similar patterns with G2 reviews, Twitter threads, even industry Slack communities. The ghost touchpoints are often where trust gets built. Luna: So how do you find these? Is it just surveys, or is there a more systematic way? Lucas: Surveys are a good start, but they're retrospective. You can also do what I call a 'touchpoint audit.' Take your last fifty closed-won deals. Interview the buyer — or, better, interview the champion inside the company who pushed for your solution. Ask them: 'Between the moment you realized you had a problem and the moment you signed, what were all the places you looked for information?' Don't prompt them with your channels. Let them list everything. You'll be surprised. Luna: I bet most of them start with a Google search that doesn't land on your site. Lucas: Exactly. And then they might read a comparison article on a third-party site, check your pricing page but leave, ask a friend who works at a company using your software, and then finally come back to request a demo. Your map probably shows the demo request as the first touchpoint, but there were four or five earlier steps you never captured. Luna: So the journey map is actually longer and more chaotic than what we draw. Lucas: Much more. And here's the dangerous part — if you're optimizing based on an incomplete map, you might be investing in the wrong channels. That SaaS company I mentioned was spending 60% of their marketing budget on search ads. Turns out, the search ads only influenced about 15% of buyers. The Reddit thread cost them nothing. Luna: So they could have reallocated budget and gotten better results. Lucas: Exactly. After they identified the ghost touchpoints, they shifted some spend toward community engagement — not astroturfing, but genuinely participating in those Reddit and Slack communities. They also started proactively soliciting reviews on G2 and Capterra. Within six months, their trial to paid conversion rate went up 22%. Luna: That's a huge lift just from mapping what was already happening. Lucas: It's not about creating new touchpoints. It's about recognizing the ones that already exist and figuring out how to influence them ethically. You can't control a Reddit thread, but you can make sure your product is good enough that someone will mention it unprompted. And you can make sure that when they do, the information is accurate. Luna: Quick honest thing — we're able to dive into stuff like this because of listeners who chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what funds this many episodes without ads. So if these conversations have sparked something you've actually used, that's the reason we can keep going. Lucas: Yeah, it makes a real difference. And we're grateful. Anyway — back to ghost touchpoints. The other big category is the 'pre-awareness' stage. Before a customer even knows your brand exists, they're consuming content that shapes their criteria. Luna: Like industry blogs, YouTube tutorials, conference talks. Lucas: Exactly. A buyer might watch a webinar from a competitor and hear a feature comparison that makes them realize they need something specific. By the time they land on your site, they already have a checklist. If your map starts at the landing page, you miss that entire formation period. Luna: So how do you capture that? It's even harder to track. Lucas: You can't track it directly, but you can infer it. Look at the search terms people use before they find you. If they're searching 'best project management software for remote teams' and then landing on your blog post about remote work, that tells you something. But if they're searching 'how to track project dependencies' — that's a different intent. The ghost touchpoint is the content that educated them on what 'dependencies' means. Luna: So the map should include those educational moments even if you didn't create them. Lucas: Right. And once you know they exist, you can start creating content that occupies that space. But it's not just about content. There's also the 'offline ghost' — the internal champion who sells your product inside their own company. That person is a touchpoint you don't control, but you can equip them. Luna: Give them slide decks, ROI calculators, case studies they can share with their boss. Lucas: Exactly. One company I worked with realized that their best deals happened when the champion sent a pre-built email template to the decision-maker. They started creating those templates and making them easy to find. That single move increased close rates by 15%. Luna: So the ghost touchpoint was the champion's inbox. They couldn't see it, but they could influence it. Lucas: Precisely. And that's the mindset shift. Instead of saying 'we can't measure it, so we ignore it,' you say 'we can't measure it, so we need to infer it and then influence it.' The journey map should be a hypothesis, not a definitive document. You update it as you learn. Luna: I think a lot of marketers are afraid to put things on the map they can't control. It feels messy. Lucas: But the customer's journey is messy. If your map is clean and linear, it's probably wrong. The best maps I've seen look almost chaotic — arrows going in all directions, notes about third-party sites, quotes from customer interviews. They're living documents. Luna: So how often should a company revisit their journey map? Lucas: At least quarterly. But more importantly, every time you do a round of customer interviews. If you hear a new touchpoint mentioned twice, add it to the map. And if you hear a touchpoint that was previously important stop being mentioned, consider removing it — or investigate why. Luna: What's the most surprising ghost touchpoint you've come across? Lucas: A B2B hardware company discovered that their biggest influencer was a niche YouTube channel run by a hobbyist who reviewed their product. The channel had only 5,000 subscribers, but it was driving more qualified leads than their entire LinkedIn ad campaign. They never would have found that if they hadn't asked customers where they heard about them. Luna: That's the kind of thing that makes you rethink the entire marketing mix. Lucas: Exactly. And it's not just about finding the ghost touchpoints — it's about respecting them. If that hobbyist YouTuber had been approached with a sponsorship, the authenticity would have been lost. The company instead sent him an early version of the next product, no strings attached. He made another great video. The cycle continued. Luna: So the lesson is: listen to your customers, they'll tell you where the real journey happens. Lucas: That's it. Your journey map is only as good as the customer stories you base it on. And if you're not including the touchpoints you don't own, you're not really mapping the journey — you're mapping your own marketing channels. Luna: Which is a completely different thing. Lucas: Totally. So next time you look at your journey map, ask yourself: what's missing? And then go find it.