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by Leeya Hendricks (@LeeyaHendricks) As with all corporate functions, marketing increasingly depends on making timely use of all available data. This marks a sea change in the profession, which once, Mad Men-style, valued creativity above all and now uses technology on which to base its opportunities, ranging from data-driven campaigns to performance tracking.

Data treasure

Mobile devices are a major driver of the new data economy. Our devices accompany us at all hours in our unceasing quest to satisfy our most-immediate urges, whether it is to fulfil a need, corroborate or discover a fact, or find, compare, buy and consume an experience, product or service. Collectively, these are ‘micro-moments’ in the customer experience, vital because they’re treasure troves of data about the buyer’s journey. Micro-moments:

  • Signal the customer’s purpose at any point — whether to engage with the brand or buy
  • Reveal their preferences at a highly granular level at various points, and
  • Produce contextual data that let businesses discover new ways to help customers

For this reason, trail-blazing companies use advanced technologies to explore micro-moments strewn across multiple new customer touchpoints and channels, and to gather intelligence and integrate all hardware platforms in a cohesive customer experience. They’ve learnt that, if customers research purchases on one device, their search results ought to deliver personalised content and contextual product information. Using retargeting, companies can serve exclusive personal content directly and consistently across all channels and respond to any customer engagement with mobile-responsive mails. Throughout the journey, data is gathered and stored at each interval to build customer profiles, with ever more granular views of their preferences used to encourage repeat purchases.

This is an area of vast opportunity: Astonishingly, only 0.5% of all the data in the world has been analysed for some purpose.

Advertising recognising the moments

What does this mean for marketers? How may we leverage the on-the-fly, momentary needs of customers?

One thing is certain: If we’re absent or otherwise don’t offer value at the customer’s fleeting moment of need, we’ve missed an important opportunity to meaningfully engage them. We may never get another chance, especially if our competitors have beaten us to it. Quite simply, we need to compete fiercely for our customers’ attention during these moments.

Are we present during our customers’ I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments? There may be a hundred of these per customer each day. Even more importantly, are we stitching them all together in one cohesive, beautiful customer-experience fabric?

The value in recognising micro-moments and capitalising on them is enormous. According to Forrester, marketers that can successfully identify micro-moments are 53% more likely to report high marketing ROI. However, just 2% of marketers is taking advantage of them. Only 26% of brands can identify micro-moments, just 27% can deliver on them, and a mere 9% can measure them.1

Anticipate, prepare, and deliver

With the universe of micro-moments constantly evolving and multiplying, it’s imperative for marketers to anticipate, prepare and deliver on them. To understand this, let’s take an example of a brand we are all familiar with: Amazon.

We know that few brands can match Amazon’s ability to create in-the-moment experiences. From purchasing Amazon books online to grabbing lunch at Amazon Go to experiencing Amazon Prime, it leads the way in delivering immersive, memorable, and frictionless experiences.

In fact, Amazon has unlocked many more micro-moments over time. Starting out as a book seller, it has since become an e-commerce, payments, logistics and retail giant and reached deeply into other industries. At the heart of this is its Prime membership, unassailably tying it all together. It is a strategy all brands should adopt: 360-degree customer experiences.

What starts as a micro-moment often leads to a larger brand engagement, if the brand gets it right.

References

1 customerthink.com/how-you-can-deliver-what-the-customer-wants-a-winning-micro-moment-strategy

Further reading

Updated on 7 August 2018.

 

Leeya HendricksLeeya Hendricks (@LeeyaHendricks) is a designated chartered marketer, global marketing strategist, digital driver and a Women in Tech leader. She holds a BA degree in fine arts, a BA honours degree in brand marketing management and is currently completing her MBA. She is now director of customer first marketing at ORACLE UKI, responsible for driving customer success through customer advocacy, and building strategic partnerships focused on emerging technology and the changed customers’ buying behaviour. Leeya contributes the monthly column “Gestalt”, about putting customer first for sustainable business success, to Marklives.

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