How many times have you used your phone to look up a phone number or address rather than flipping through the Yellow Pages? Or, perhaps you promised to bring homemade sangria to a picnic and need to quickly find the recipe. Do you dig through hundreds of recipe cards, or do you just do a quick Google search on your phone?
More and more often, smartphones are being used to seek out information quickly, and these short bursts of digital activity throughout the day indicate a changing tide in the way consumers absorb media.
Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, recently penned an article for the Wall Street Journal that raises some interesting points about the way we use mobile phones and the opportunity it’s creating for advertisers. Rather than having a few, long periods of media consumption where they’d sit on a desktop computer for over an hour at a time, people are now digitally engaging for shorter amounts of time, more frequently, thanks to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
These moments of media consumption can include texting, checking social media, looking at the time, or blindly scrolling through blog posts. But the moments that should be on every advertiser’s radar are those that are intent-driven. During these intent-driven “micro-moments”, smartphone users have specific needs they’re looking to meet, whether it be by watching a how-to video, discovering nearby restaurants, booking a flight, comparing products at a store, or making a purchase.
Micro-moments represent a crucial change in the way advertisers and brands should think about consumers. Rather than only having a few chances to reach your audience, there are now numerous moments that matter. In fact, 91% of smartphone users admit to looking up information right in the midst of another task, and when surveyed, one in three consumers reported using their phone to find information while shopping instead of asking a store associate. These are just a few indications that there’s an expanding opportunity for brands to take advantage of in the mobile space.
Micro-moments, while at first glance may seem insignificant, are adding up to cause a seismic shift in the way people consume data. The key for advertisers and brands is to be able to differentiate and seize these micro-moments, the moments of “I-want-to-know”. During these micro-moments, consumer expectations are at an all-time high–They expect brands to deliver what they want, when they want it. When nearly 70% of online consumers report that timing, relevance, and quality of a message influences their entire perception of a brand, it’s important to meet, or even exceed, their expectations.
Source: The Wall Street Journal