How To Optimise Your Marketing In The Age Of Micromoments

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This is a guest post by Katie Rose.

Time is of the essence. Particularly within marketing, brands need to maximize the value of the time they spend engaging with customers. Google describes these moments as ‘micromoments’. The idea of them is that through each encounter, meaningful relationships should be continually developed with buyers.

As search users, we expect information to be at our fingertips and tailored specifically to our needs. Whether it’s more useful information, more personalization or more immediacy, human beings never stop wanting more. How businesses communicate these needs to their customers, can be make or break to the company. That’s the power of a micromoment. Learn what they are and how they can affect you.

What Are Micromoments?

Micromoments are the treasured times brands get to communicate with consumers. They play a crucial role in building the foundations for customer loyalty – a key factor in keeping your business alive and growing.

Types Of Micromoments

Micromoments come in a variety of types. Search Engine Land divided them into four categories: want-to know, want-to-go, want-to-do and want-to-buy moments.

Although interacting with buyers can be done in multiple ways, micromoments only really occur on mobile. And, with internet usage on the verge of being dominated by smartphones, creating quality, mobile-friendly customer experiences proves vital for business.

How Mobile Comes Into Play

For many companies, mobile is increasingly accounting for more and more sales. According to StatCounter’s worldwide device usage data, between July 2016 to July 2017, mobile usage edged forward in the market with a share of 56.81% compared to desktop’s market share, at 43.19%.

Effectively connecting with customers goes hand-in-hand with being up to date with technology. Customers want answers quick. Scanning through product reviews can be as easy as A-B-C with a smartphone and take a matter of minutes. That is, if your website allows that.

Mobile-friendly sites grant customers short bursts of interactivity with a brand. It is in these moments that successful, customer conversions, are potential. Combine web visitor analysis with individual interaction data, to easily understand and capitalize on every lead. Knowing what visitors want to achieve in their quick encounters with you, proves a significant insight into where they are in the consumer decision making journey. This way, you can personalize their experience by giving them the most relevant content when their interest is at its highest.

Consumer Decision Making Journey

Technology is transforming the consumer decision making journey. Unfortunately, it is also making it harder for businesses to capture leads. A great example is with Philips, a leading technological company, predominantly known for electronic products.

“Philips has more searches on Amazon than via search engines. What should be the first stage of the journey is now happening on the shopping platform at the end of the journey.” – Marketing Week’s blog post

Philips are one of the many experiencing anything other than the traditional, consumer decision making, sales models. Every process, from product design to customer service, will need to undergo a rethinking.


It’s imperative for businesses, to adopt new methods to learn about each and every one of their website visitors. Through clever monitoring systems, businesses can understand who customers are, their needs and wants and their buying patterns and behaviour. Great! Using this information, you can map out buyer intent along the buying cycle, to move them onto the next stage of micromoments.

Need A Business Example?

Let’s put things into perspective. A customer showed interest in one of your products two days ago. They added it to their e-commerce basket but decided against making a purchase. When they return you can pretty well assume they are there to seal the deal. Now you must encourage them…

Through highlighting social media reviews, integrating chatbots or displaying your similar products via page adverts, this relevant content helps consumers hit the ‘buy’ button to increase your sales. If a buyer halts their buying journey the first time, behaviour data and analysis helps you to place them back into the stage they left at, only to make this encounter more valuable. That’s making the most of micromoments, at it’s finest!

The Retail Industry And Micromoments

In retail, mobile commerce now accounts for 36% of UK e-retail sales and with the continuing technical advancements, this figure won’t be reducing anytime soon. Research shows that we as a population, are checking our smartphones and mobile devices, dozens of times a day and multi-tasking when doing so.

No matter the product customers are buying – big or small, expensive or cheap – they tend to head to their phones for some quick research, before making a sale. Why? Just because they can. Finding out which product is the best on the market at that given time, is a piece of cake. So, how do you show them you’re their go-to seller?

Be The Go-To Seller

By delivering personalized content in a wide range of options, you can help to answer their questions in every possible way. Having lots of relevant information fills your website visitors with confidence. If they know you know what you are doing, they can trust you to deliver a product, service or answer that’s a perfect (or almost perfect), match to their needs. As a retailer, providing customers with their ideal product is even more important.

Shopping On Mobile

When shopping on a mobile device, users expect to quickly browse and research transactions and make one-touch purchases, on-the-go, whenever the mood strikes. In fact, Google states that “smartphone users are 50% more likely to expect to purchase something immediately while using their smartphone compared to a year ago.” With this in mind, retailers must optimize these processes to cater to their audiences before competitors do.

Top Tips For Retailers

  • Target different but relevant, website content to specific visitors on your website, in real time.
  • Make sure you monitor and analyze website traffic data, in-depth and regularly.
  • Expand customer support hours to be realistic to the customer – even if that is being available 24 hours, 7 days a week!
  • Improve customer assistance with live chat buttons or video tutorials that offer help to customers through a human presence.
  • Integrate popular payment technologies, such as PayPal, to offer online and mobile transactions in a quick and easy way
  • Treat a customer’s mobile device how they see it – as a relationship, not just a device.

By following these top tips you can reach the right people, at the right time for the right outcome.

Let’s Conclude

Digital growth has skyrocketed. It’s imperative to keep a watchful eye on the mobile commerce trends that continue to evolve. Expectations are inevitably only going to rise. As these expectations continue to grow, so do the requirements (and opportunities) for marketers.

Making the most of technology and providing customers with the best content when it matters, builds long-lasting customer relationships. That’s to the advantage of all businesses, not just retailers. However, from studying shoppers and their online behaviour, different industries can use these successful examples to capitalize on their leads to drive ongoing achievements.

If there is one observation you should have taken from this, it’s clear the future of commerce belongs to mobile. That’s for now anyway!

Author Bio: Katie Rose writes creative, digital marketing articles to help retail businesses better their online presence. Her focus is giving retailers useful and informative posts – without compromising on entertainment. She has obtained ALISON Sales and Journalism certificates, and is Level 3 qualified in Digital Marketing. Her broad understanding of digital aspects, is utilized through the employment of eCommerce agency, iWeb. Learn how Katie’s writing can enhance your digital marketing strategy, through her collection of blog posts.

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