Thursday, 10 March 2016

How can marketers harness micro-moments to win the mobile battlegrounds


Another great opportunity provided by Powered by Search to attend Google partners meeting at Google Canada’s headquarter.

Source: Google partners meeting, Toronto

Google started the session with an astounding fact that mobile phones and tablets surpassed desktops in 8 years with 2,000 million global sales in 2015.

Source: Google partners meeting, Toronto

How Mobile Impact Brands

Mobile Search

I noticed that when I asked my team to check our new website last year, most of them checked on their mobile phones.

This year, 80-90 percent of Super Bowl related searches across Google and YouTube were done on mobile phones.

Soon, mobile will represent 50% of the world’s online traffic. No company can afford to miss this mobile trend. However, it is crucial to understand how to act and benefit in a mobile world.

Micro Moments

Mobile has changed the way consumer behaves and has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro moments.

What are micro moments? As Google explained that we live not in years, months, even hours, but in moments. We all try to make the most in every moment. The following graph gives an example of micro moments:

Source: Google partners meeting, Toronto

New Battlegrounds for Brands

As the following graph illustrates that micro moments mean the new battlegrounds for brands:

  • Reduced time spent per visit
  • Increased use of mobile search
  • Mobile conversion rates growth

Source: Google partners meeting, Toronto

How Can Marketers Succeed at Micro-moment Marketing?

Identify Your Consumer’s Micro Moments

Companies can utilize a free tool - Google trends to identify what consumers search at different time periods in different regions and develop the marketing opportunity accordingly.

Spin Master identified that consumers searched its toys like Zoomer Dino right before Christmas for last-minute shopping and designed targeted ads to meet these shoppers’ needs resulted in a significant increase in sales.

Content and Intent

Needless to say how important companies have to understand consumers’ needs with data.
In a situation that we need to learn, do, find or buy something right now, many of us pick up our mobile phone. The micro-moments happen constantly whether in the form of searches, app interactions, mobile site visits or video views. Therefore, as it’s said that “Being present is half the battle.”

Sephora, a beauty retailer applied a data-drive approach for its mobile strategy. They found out that consumers tend to use their mobile phones to search for product reviews or remember what was the product they bought last time before they buy a product.

Sephora utilized Google’s local inventory ads and its app to help consumers make a decision while they are in a beauty store and provides high quality of customer experiences.

Consumers are loyal to their needs not brands nowadays. Companies who can meet and even exceed consumer’s requirements will outperform other brands.

Measurement

As management thinker Peter Drucker said if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Google provided a list of sample metrics to measure marketing campaign effectiveness as illustrated in the following picture.

Source: Google partners meeting, Toronto

These metrics are all important. However, what matters most is how marketing campaigns can increase sales and revenue, especially for entrepreneurial businesses.

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