Everything can change in a moment including how consumers feel about your brand, which is why moment marketing is so important. With 76 percent of consumers interacting with brands or products before stepping foot in a store, marketers need to be savvy about offering the information consumers want, when and how they want it. This is where moment marketing comes in.
It’s about creating the content or tools to enable people to accomplish whatever they want in that particular moment. (David Edelman)
Moment Marketing: A Shift In Strategy
Marketers used to struggle with managing real time interactions and engaging consumers in ways that weren’t disruptive to their lives. They needed to attract, then bond with consumers before leading them to the purchase stage. Now that’s all changing. You can do both simultaneously by predicting consumer needs and making valuable solutions easy to access. It’s all about having a sophisticated view of your consumer’s decision journey.
Given their incredible access to information, consumers need your brand to have information at a moment’s notice. Google calls this a micro moment—when a person turns to their electronic device to act on a need to know, go, do, or buy something. Consumers experience them roughly 150 times a day.
David Edelman, global co-leader of Digital and Marketing & Sales Practice at McKinsey & Company describes these moments as a timely need resolved through smart content or tools: “Brands can identify micro-moments by recognizing times when someone has a particular type of need. Someone may need to learn something, somebody may need to get something done, or someone may need to buy something. It’s about creating the content or tools to enable people to accomplish whatever they want in that particular moment.”
Moment marketing has given brands a chance to become proactive again. According to research from McKinsey & Company, the key is to eliminate the consideration and evaluation phase of the decision journey altogether. Optimize your brand journey while providing excellent value and your consumer won’t want to go anywhere else.
Image courtesy mattisdovier/GIPHY
What Can Marketers Do?
Nearly 70 percent of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company’s message influences their perception of a brand. When you consider that more than 2 billion Google searches are made every day; it’s no wonder that 91 percent of smartphone users will look up information while in the middle of a task. Smartphones for example, make it easier to research, review and compare your products before making a purchase. Finding ways to be there in those fleeting moments of inquiry encourage your consumer to stick around.
So how can marketers strategize consumers’ moments of intent?
- Ideate your consumer’s journey. What needs do they have relative to your offering? Determine the micro moments created from that need
- Weave together the important players including marketing, IT, purchasing, etc., to figure out the outcomes you want your brand to achieve
- Create an ecosystem using websites, mobile apps, sales tools, web analytics and automated steps to achieve those outcomes
- Track your outcomes and look for ways to update your strategy. Make branding and consumer personalization an important part of the user experience