Today we live in a wired world and need to understand strategies to connect to consumers
The “Wild West” Internet of Everything & Mobile Marketing – strategies to do marketing to digital consumer
I use this cliché advisedly here; it is indeed wild territory out there, available for you to stake a claim if you have learnt the lay of the land and got your horses ready. This new world is evolving so fast that it’s impossible to make lasting rules. You just make your own as you go along and hold a wet finger up in the air for any winds of change.
When you and a lot of us went to business school, we were taught only about three marketing channels:
(i) point-of-sale,
(ii) print and electronic media, and
(iii) catalogues, because our textbooks had been written by grey-haired men in tweed jackets. No one knew of, or was paying any attention to, two bearded youths working in their garage to give birth to a new device – and a new world – that would put everything you thought you knew about “reaching out” on its head.
My guess is also that these three channels have by and large become blind spots for most consumers. While your company continues to allocate a very large share of the marketing budget (See below), the market has moved on. Your consumer carries an entire information universe in his pocket, in the shape of the ubiquitous smartphone. When an idea or a desire pops up in his or her head, your consumer will not wait to reach home and review the catalogue, or walk in to a store to speak with a sales representative. The consumer seeks immediate gratification, because immediate gratification is what they provide to their customer in their line of work.
Spend on digital marketing continues to increase despite decrease in overall spend
According to some researchers, a good 91% of smart phone users will, during the day’s routine, refer to their phones to seek information about what they’re doing and operational guidance on how to do it. And these 91% will, it is safe to assume, exhibit the same information habits when making personal purchase decisions. And because the human brain runs multiple processes simultaneously, there’s no knowing what new ideas may pop in to their heads while they’re on the phone. The question you need to ask yourself is whether your content will follow these consumers as they flip from screen to screen in search of gratification, or will you get overtaken by more adept marketers whose content adapts to the searches being made by your target.
It’s also generally taken as a given nowadays that the modern consumer is a very quick decision-maker, and is not quite as deliberative as consumers a generation ago. 62% of consumers are more than likely to take urgent decisions while solving an unexpected problem. Now, please don’t be fooled into thinking that just because they’re quick decision makers, they’re easy to sell to; if anything, they’re quite the opposite. 82% of consumers are highly likely to refer to their phones to influence a purchase decision while they’re in a store. And because your phone knows that your consumer is in a particular store, you – or your online marketing platform – should know it too, and hopefully direct your target consumer towards the “correct” aisle. It is safe to say that the smartphone has fractured the purchase journey into hundreds of intent-driven micro-moments. And each of these micro moments is a critical opportunity for brands (that’s you) to market themselves in ever-changing ways.
Using Think With Google, we can broadly organise these moments into four categories that deserve your attention as a marketer:
- Research moments: “I want to know” – 65% of online consumers look up more information online than a few years ago. 66% of smartphone users look up something they saw in a television commercial.
- Reach moments: “I want to go” – 200% increase in “near me” searches and 82% of smartphone users use a search engine to look for a local business.
- Action moments: “I want to do” – 91% of smartphone users turn to their phones for ideas while doing a task and over 100 million hours of how-to content has been watched on YouTube so far this year.
- Purchase moments: “I want to buy” – 82% of smartphone users consult their phones while in a store deciding what to buy. This has resulted in a 29% increase in mobile conversion rates in the past year.
The world moved, at a pace that at that time seemed fairly rapid, from three channels to an omni-channel e-commerce; but the flight towards a hydra-headed “Internet of Everything” is happening in a breath-taking flash. It is becoming painfully obvious to the astute observer that we have to dramatically improve content that drives the Purchase moment. It is still more at the art stage than already being a science, but “Think with Google” provides a few tips and tricks to help us get on the right path:
1. Make a moments map.
Identify a set of moments you want to win or can’t afford to lose. Examine all phases of the consumer journey to map moments when people want to find inspiration, learn about your products, make a quick purchase, or anything in between.
2. Understand customer needs in-the-moment.
For each moment you want to win, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Ask “What would make this easier or faster? What content or features would be most helpful for this moment?”
3. Use context to deliver the right experience.
Leverage contextual signals like location and time of day to deliver experiences and messages that feel tailor-made for the moment. For example, let customers who are searching nearby your stores know when the products they’re looking for are in-stock or available for pickup in-store.
4. Optimize across the journey.
People move seamlessly across screens and channels. Does your brand deliver seamlessly in return? Don’t let competing objectives or department silos stand in the way. To account for today’s complex, fractured journeys, anchor completely on the consumer and organize around moments.
5. Measure every moment that matters.
You cannot afford to under-serve your customers while you’re dealing with measurement gaps. While the return on investment for certain moments may not yet be directly measurable, train your team to use credible estimates to ensure nothing’s falling through the cracks.
Will the tips be sufficient for us to navigate our way in the cyber-marketing world? Will new rules be defined as this environment evolves further? Will new human behaviour patterns emerge – and need to be researched by market research experts – to help develop yet newer channels for marketing one’s brand? It is too early to tell. But it is nevertheless a fair guess that the bearded youths of yesterday have already become the tweed jacketed professors of today, and have been upstaged by a new breed of bedraggled innovators, waiting to be upstaged the next innovation wave. Are you on your surfboard yet?
At MarkiTech, we help develop and commercialize technology products and services while helping with marketing to digital consumer.
We can also specialize in developing customized training needs in the field of technology, sales and marketing. Please send us an email or contact us at Get Started Link and let us talk about how we can help your business grow.
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Written by
Khurram Jamil Butt aka KJB,
Content Manager, MarkiTech (October 2015)
Edited by
Nauman Jaffar, CEO MarkiTech
Desktop and other forms of marketing will remain important in the near future but mobile is fast becoming a channel of significant use for research and instant decision making. Prepare yourself for this second wave by downloading our Ebook “Branching into Mobile Marketing – 3 immediate benefits for a Marketer”:
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