What Are Micro Moments and How Can You Use Them to Capture Consumers?

Each of these moments when we use our devices to address or fulfill an immediate need is known by Google as a “micro moment,” and each micro moment presents a wealth of opportunity for digital marketers.

Micro Moments Explained

Micro moments generally fall into one of the following four categories:

• I-want-to-know moments

• I-want-to-do moments

• I-want-to-go moments

• I-want-to-buy moments

What all of these micro moments have in common is the idea of user intent. When a need or a want presents itself, an entirely different level of engagement takes place in terms of how mobile users interact with digital content. It only makes sense for consumers to be more receptive to marketing messages when they’re seeking to know something, do something, find something, buy something, etc., If your brand can deliver exactly what the user is looking for in those moments, they’re much more likely to convert into a lead or customer.

How to Use Micro Moments to Capture Customers

Micro moments are those all-important points in time where consumer preferences are being established and decisions are being made. If you want to position your business to leverage micro moments for customer acquisition, keep the following points in mind:

1. Be there.

As Woody Allen once famously quipped, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Your first task as a brand is to find ways to be there in those micro moments when potential prospects need you most.

A quick test you can perform to find out if your brand is present is to think about the most popular search queries for your product or service, and then try searching for those terms on your mobile device. Does your business show up? If you don’t like the results you see, you’ll definitely have to allocate some resources to mobile search marketing and display advertising.

2. Make sure your content is mobile-friendly and useful.

It’s a great thing for your website to be found for mobile searches containing your target keywords, but you could still lose customers’ attention with an unresponsive website and/or irrelevant content. You have to make sure that your site has been designed to display properly on mobile devices, and that your web pages will load quickly.

Multiple studies have shown that the average Internet user won’t stick around for more than three seconds waiting on a slow-loading site, so be sure that your page elements have been optimized for speed. In addition, your content must be useful enough to provide relevant information to your audience when they need it, in real-time. This means that you’ve already thought through your customers’ potential I-want-to-buy, I-want-to-do, I-want-to-know, etc., moments, and you’ve customized your content to appeal specifically to those needs.

3. Streamline your content.

Mobile users are incessantly on-the-go, so it would be a mistake to assume that all of their micro moments will occur at convenient times. Build your mobile user experience around the assumption that your customer is already in a hurry, and streamline your content to cater to their need for speed.

This means eliminating all unnecessary steps wherever possible so that customers won’t have to jump through multiple hoops in order to complete your calls-to-action. Some examples include providing auto-fill text for contact forms, choosing drop-down menus in order to limit typing tasks, offering touchable “one-tap” product selections, or click-to-call ordering.

The seismic shift towards mobile Internet usage is showing no signs of slowing down, so it’s up to businesses to adapt to these sweeping changes in order to thrive in the mobile era. Be sure to keep the tips outlined above in mind so that you can make the most of your audience’s micro moments.