With consumers checking their phones almost 100 times a day, micro-moments are the new battleground for brands. Micro-moments are the times when consumers turn to their phones to take action on whatever they need or want in the moment.
According to Google, there are four key micro-moments.
- “I-want-to-know moment” — for information that provides an answer to a question.
- “I-want-to-go moment” — for a nearby business or when considering purchasing from a local store.
- “I-want-to-do moment” — for guidance to help complete a task or try something new.
- “I-want-to-buy moment” — when a consumer is considering making a purchase.
How you interact with consumers during these micro-moments determines their experience with your brand — specifically, whether they shop with you, or move on. Here are five ways you can improve your customer journey with micro-moments.
Understand Your Mobile Customers
Enhancing your customer journey during micro-moments starts with understanding how your customers behave. This will enable you to deliver better experiences and influence their buying decisions. Below are three steps you can take to get to know your customers better.
Research: Conduct interviews and surveys with the aim of getting to know more about your customers. Ask them about their typical day and how they engage with problems your product is designed to solve. Dig into other data sources that reveal how consumers interact with your brand.
Identify Touchpoints: Make a list of brand-customer touchpoints and categorize them based on when they happen during their journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Evaluate each touchpoint.
interaction to determine how easily customers accomplish their goals and determine where there is room for improvement.
Understand Your Customer Journey: Visualize a day in the life of your customer by creating a customer journey map. This will help you know what customers want, uncover pain points, and deliver value at each micro-moment.
Be Present
With consumers discovering, researching, and purchasing products wherever they are, today’s customer path to purchase is no longer linear. This means that you have to be present across all stages of the consumer journey in order to make an impression. To accomplish this, consider three tips.
Understand Intent: To meet the needs of consumers during micro-moments, you need to understand their intent. Use search data to identify search goals and address this micro-moment by sending them relevant advertising and messaging.
To goad consumers toward making a purchase during I-want-to-buy moments, leverage data analytics and AI-powered tools to understand customer intent in real-time and engage them with the most relevant ads, content, and merchandise.
Understand Context: Deliver messaging using context as a springboard, and use content to propel customers to interact with your brand. Think about how your customers’ needs change based on their device or location, and aim to communicate with them in a way that moves them from impulse to purchase in a single interaction.
Show Up in Search: Mobile searches influence how people find information in their I-want-to-know moment, and thus, where they eventually shop. 52% of consumers have occasionally purchased a competing product because it appeared in the search results along with the specific brand they searched for. Identify the words consumers use in their mobile search for your brand or category and harness those insights to bid on terms that are relevant to your offerings and goals. You can also use this tactic to promote your local inventory.
Be Useful
Be useful to customers during micro-moments by providing them with relevant information when they need it. 57% of consumers have made a purchase as a result of encountering valuable online content from a brand. Use the tips below as a guide to create content that your customers will find useful at micro-moments.
Snackable Content: During I-want-to-know moments, consumers are looking to learn. Find out what interests them about your products or category as they move through their customer journey and create educational content that provides helpful answers. Your content should be bit-sized (think two-minute videos), available on demand, and easy to find on your website or app.
How-To Videos: Create video content to help consumers achieve results in their I-want-to-do-moments. Identify how-to searches that are related to your brand and create tutorials on how to use your products. Post your how-to videos on YouTube, and make them easy to find by including descriptive titles and relevant tags.
Go Local: During I-want-to-go moments, consumers are looking for stores near them to make purchases. Highlight your store location, opening hours, and navigation links in your ads, app, and mobile site to help customers find you. Customize the information consumers receive based on their location, and use local ads to exhibit in-store inventory to customers when they’re on the go.
Be Fast
Mobile consumers are generally impatient and in pursuit of immediate gratification. It’s no surprise that 23% of consumers will abandon a purchase if the checkout process is too long or complicated. Here are some ways you can deliver a timely mobile experience during micro-moments and capitalize on that valuable time:
Simplify the Buying Process: Convert customers fast during I-want-to-buy moments by reducing the steps it takes to complete a purchase. For instance, consider implementing one-click functionality like Amazon. Use analytics data to help customers fill forms and place CTAs for primary activities in a prominent spot on your homepage or app.
Be Proactive: Anticipate micro-moments ahead of time to meet your customers’ needs. Review customer journey statistics or interview customers about their experiences to identify their needs and find ways to guide them through their journey with content or tools.
Be Fast: Ensure your mobile site is designed to display properly on various mobile devices and that it loads quickly. Test your mobile site speed and involve your technical team to come up with ideas on how to improve.
Measure Your Moments
Measure your micro-moment strategy to find out how mobile impacts your bottom line. As consumers move seamlessly across multiple devices, measuring attribution can be tricky. Keep the tips below in mind when measuring the role of mobile in micro-moments.
- Account for all types of mobile-driven conversions, including those that happen in your store, app, and call center.
- Plot every customer interaction and analyze channel interconnectedness with the constant goal of optimized customer support.
- Collect online and offline consumer data from across the marketing mix and use it to measure how online channels draw shoppers into your store.
- Merge your online and offline teams to break silos and create closer collaboration.
Make Every Moment Count
Including micro-moments in your customer journey is a strategy that can help you boost your business. Prioritize micro-moments where decisions are being made and work to improve them through better content and customer service. Micro-moments are fertile settings for brand interactions, so keep up with consumer trends to ensure you’re meeting the demands of your customers in the moments that matter.