Micro-Moments: The New Battleground To Win Mobile Customers
Micro-moments are intent-rich searches that are a "new battleground" to win mobile customers. How can marketers succeed?
Google has coined the term ’micro-moments’ to describe the times when people instinctively reach for their smartphone or tablet to learn, find, do or buy something,and warned brands that this is the new battleground for winning and losing potential mobile consumers. How can you incorporate micro-moments into your marketing strategy?
These intent-rich searches contribute to billions of queries every month and occur when people have a spare moment, such as waiting in a queue, commuting, walking, dining, shopping, or in bed.
This is having a significant effect on the way brands interact with mobile customers, as the time to capture the user’s attention is explicitly small and their expectations are higher than ever before.
In order to succeed in this “new battleground”, as Google describes it, brands must carefully consider the quality, timing, relevance and usefulness of their mobile marketing.
Ultimately, whoever does the best job of addressing the user’s need in-the-moment, wins.
Analyse
The first step to incorporating micro-moments into your strategy is to identify a set of moments that matter. Examine all aspects of the customer journey and map out the various points when people are looking for inspiration, learning about your products, preparing to purchase, and everything in-between.
For each moment, identify what exactly the user requires and what will help them to convert easier and quicker. Analysing mobile data in Google Analytics and Search Console, and asking the audience with tools such as Qualaroo or an exit survey can help to gather this insight.
Deliver
Simply appearing in each moment isn’t enough though. Brands must tailor a unified marketing strategy across search, content, social, and display to deliver the relevant information or answer.
Google research tells us that YouTube searches including “how to” are growing 70% year-on-year, while 91% of smartphone users turn to their devices to help them complete a task. Find out the main concerns people have related to your type of products and put the answers at the centre of your content strategy.
Incorporating user context into your messaging is essential. For example, interest in “near me” and “nearby” searches have almost doubled since last year , so if you are looking to drive footfall to a local store, adding location extensions to your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads will provide a phone number and directions to your doorstep.
Optimise
The next step is to look at each micro-moment from a Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) perspective.
Ensuring that your website is optimised for mobile and offers a pain-free user experience is a given. Instead, you really need to focus on how people engage with your site’s content, by analysing results from your site’s search function and heat-mapping with a tool like Crazy Egg.
This will ensure that any barriers to conversion can be removed, helping to accelerate the customer journey in the short window of time provided.
Measure
Finally, make sure to measure all of the micro-moments that you want to win. As mobile technology has fragmented the customer journey, cross-device tracking is essential and you constantly need to evaluate whether you have reached your audience and if they paid attention or not.
After all, this is the only way to ensure that your marketing strategy adapts to changes and provides a high return on investment.
To find out more on the various types of micro-moments and view an interactive graphic display explaining the statistics and trends click Here
Find out more on the future of Content Marketing at our DLUK - Trends briefing on the 24th September 2015