Micro-Moments and Your Brand

Is your brand ready to handle micro-moments?

"Micro-moments have been accelerating consumer expectations for “right here, right now” experiences. People take for granted that information is at their fingertips and tailored to their specific needs. But the thing about human beings is they never stop wanting that little bit extra. It’s becoming evident that they’ll keep raising the bar, wanting more useful information, more personalization, more immediacy. My team wanted to dig into these evolving expectations and understand how consumer behavior has changed since we first introduced micro-moments."
- From Think With Google

Google groups micro-moments into three ways the data takes shape: well-advised, right-here, and right-now. It's possible your brand has something in motion today will suffice for passable mico-moment experiences. But, it's important to review the current customer experience and understand what hurdles you may have to overcome to meet these expectations.

Well-advised

Customer Behavior: People are using their mobile phones to research their purchases, for things as mundane as toothbrushes (yes, even a parity product!). Google's research even shows that searchers are using qualifiers, such as "best toothbrush". This means they're not just seeking out feedback about the item, but they're looking for crowd-sourced solutions in their results.

What to Consider: Check your content marketing and look over what you have currently and consider with the impact this could have for SEO results and rankings. If people care about the best product or service, you want your brand associated with this list, be it from John Doe's blog or Consumer Reports. Another piece to consider is the way you are overseeing customer reviews - take a look at how you are managing it and evaluate if you need to improve your current process. Be sure your teams are bringing forward thinking that helps your customers find more useful information to stay competitive.

Right-here

Customer Behavior: People expect brands to gather enough contextual information to deliver location-specific responses. They know you have information because other brands (not even your competitors) do. If Yelp can know where I am, why can't my mobile banking app? You know that it's snowing where I am, so make the information you show me relevant to my situation. It's not about a competitive set - customers expect all brands to be able to deliver at the same level as an

What to Consider: Review the data you have accessible and explore interaction points where you can better apply the information to cut out unnecessary or redundant data inputs by customers. With new feature sets and product improvements, you should always put contextual personalization at the top of the list. Brands who use data to help customers find what they're looking for will be the ones to achieve success.

Right-now

Customer Behavior: Customers are using their mobile devices for immediate needs like last minute purchases (think: forgotten birthday!). Instant gratification is not just wanted in the purchase phase but delivery as well--just look at companies like Instacart and Amazon Prime Now.

What to Consider: Explore your current ecosystem and seek out opportunities to deliver on more instantaneous delivery. Ask your customers for inputs, too. They're a great resource to get suggestions to for improvement and can help highlight the best placement in the user experience for it. Continue to push for immediacy and find new ways to get the sense of instant gratification to your customers.

Do you have other tips or suggestions? Leave them in the comments.