Corina Cimpoca, Founder of MKOR Consulting, was invited as a speaker at the Business Days Cluj event on December 14-15.


The theme of the session Corina was invited to speak at was “Digital Behavior. Preferences, behavior, and concerns in a hyper-connected world”.

Corina chose to talk to the audience about Micro-Moments – those moments when you hear or remember something and immediately start searching the internet for the information you want to find.

And, more specifically, about how marketers can benefit from these “micro-moments” to respond as quickly and completely as possible to the immediate questions of potential customers.

We invite you to find out interesting details by watching Corina Cimpoca’s presentation at Business Days Cluj 2016.

What are micro-moments?

Micro-moments are those moments when you want to know what something is, what it does, or how a thing or product can help you. Google defined “Micro-moments” as the mobile trend that defines our preferences as users.

Think about it: you take your phone out of your pocket hundreds of times a day to check the time, see who messaged you on WhatsApp, or set a reminder. And then there are the moments when you take your phone out to search for a product or information. These are micro-moments.

Micro-moments from a marketer’s perspective

Let’s take your website as an example. What does a first-time visitor find on your site? What do you tell them as a marketer? Do you say “come to us, we have offers” on a site that isn’t even mobile-optimized, or do you say “before you decide whether to buy from us, let me tell you why we are special and why you should come to us, look at all the things we offer you! And by the way, we also have an offer for you!”? Which approach do you think will turn the visitor into a customer?

On a landing page, you can have a lead-generation form (or button or pop-up) to obtain information about your visitors, whom you can then target with 100% customized newsletters. You don’t have to sell to them right away because they didn’t come to your site to buy, but to look for information.

Moreover, you have to tell them WHY very quickly, because 91% of mobile users search for information online while doing something else!

With the help of tools like Hubspot, you can track if your lead opens the emails you send and if they read them. If you see them hesitating to complete an order, you can increase “urgency” by granting a personalized discount. However, even if they don’t buy now, you already have enough information about them to return with personalized offers in the future.

However, watch out for traps! Periodically, convince your database with small incentives to give you more information about them, so you don’t look ridiculous. For example, it’s better not to send a Valentine’s Day offer to someone who just became single. But for whom you could organize a speed dating party 😉

Mobile behavior

Digital behavior could just as well be called “mobile behavior.” Smartphones and wearables are constantly growing in terms of Internet consumption, and this is definitively changing the perception and expectations of the brands users interact with. Basically, users have hundreds of daily interactions with their mobile phones, where they have different intentions, from finding out something right here, right now, to buying – right here, right now.

Furthermore, interactions have become very multi-platform. That is, a user starts the “journey” on mobile, continues the search on a laptop, reads a review on a tablet, and then completes the transaction on mobile.

However, every occasion a user picks up their smartphone to search for something is an opportunity for your brand, for you as a marketer, to impress them, to be there with the answers they need. As a marketer, you have the opportunity daily, for those looking for information in your field, to be there on the first page of Google to provide answers to those seeking them. But being on the first page is not enough. You must have relevant answers, and this is a difficult mix to achieve.

What users expect from brands

Users expect a lot from your brand. Moreover, brand loyalty is much lower than loyalty to one’s own needs. 65% of smartphone users say that when they search for something on mobile, they look for the most relevant information, regardless of which brand it comes from.

Users expect you to be THERE

As a marketer, you make a commitment to your consumers that you will be there for them, with the information they need, when they need it.

Whether it’s Google searches, apps, mobile site visits, or YouTube videos, you need to be there for users looking for information that you have.

Users expect you to be HELPFUL

It takes more than just your brand’s presence online. As a marketer, you need to provide relevant content for your consumers and connect them with the answers they are looking for.

Users expect you to be FAST

Micro-moments are named that for a reason: mobile users expect their experience on your site to be flawless. Moreover, 40% of mobile users are in a hurry when searching for something. 70% leave a site because it loads too slowly. 67% abandon a transaction because they have to go through too many steps to reach the desired result.

For example, you can eliminate steps by adding the one-click transaction, patented by Amazon and adopted by more and more online stores.

Why does it matter?

90% of smartphone users are not loyal to a brand. That is, when they search for something online, they are not sure which brand they are looking for or where they want to buy from. This can be to your advantage if you know how to play it!

Moreover, 1 in 3 smartphone users bought from a different brand than originally planned because they received the information they needed from elsewhere.

Last but not least, being present as a brand gives you the chance to be chosen by consumers, not just seen.

What happens if you’re not there? Or you’re not relevant?

40% of users are less likely to return to your site
28% probably won’t buy products from your brand in the future
29% of users will immediately go to another site, looking for the information they need

What happens when you look at your brand on mobile?

I suggest you do a test: pick up your smartphone and do a few searches with keywords relevant to your industry. Are you in the top results? If so, do you like what you see? Are you there for YouTube as well? If not, take your team or marketing agency for a long meeting and find out what you can do to be there, to increase your “share of intent,” which is a new metric that quantifies how many times you are there when consumers search for you.

Evaluate for both mobile and desktop! One of the traps you can fall into is putting too much emphasis on one of the platforms and simply destroying the experience on the others. User experiences are multi-platform, and so should your attention be.

In other words: you don’t have mobile customers and desktop customers. You have customers, period.

And if you’re not there, you’re giving an opportunity to your competitors. And nobody wants that. Well, except for your competitors! 😉

What can you do as a marketer?

1. Map the moments

Identify the moments you want to win or that you cannot afford to lose. Go through all the phases of the journey that consumers experience and find all the moments where people might look for inspiration, find product information, buy something quickly, or anything else.

Where do you start? There can be hundreds of such micro-moments. Brainstorm! Take your mobile phone and thoroughly search for keywords or phrases that can be linked to your brand’s activity. When you have enough, you can divide them into several categories:

I-want-to-know (someone is searching, getting informed without the intention to buy — 66% of smartphone users search on mobile for something they saw in a TV commercial),
I-want-to-go (someone is looking for a store or local place in the area — near me searches have increased 2X in just one year)
I-want-to-do (when someone wants to know how to use something, when they want to solve something practical — how-to searches have a 70% year-on-year growth)
I-want-to-buy (the moment we are all waiting for! However, don’t expect people to search specifically for your brand or product; rather, make sure you are present in the category, on related searches, with the right arguments to close the deal with your future customer)

2. Make sure you understand the consumer’s needs at that moment

For every moment you want to win, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes, do customer profiling. Ask yourself: How could I do this faster and easier? What content would be most helpful to me at this moment if I were a user on our site? Are you present for all the moments when the consumer has a need, wants something, or is simply curious?

3. Use context to provide the best experience

Use the consumer’s context, such as location or time of day, to send them messages and experiences that seem tailored specifically for them at that time. For example, if a consumer is searching for a product and is near your store, give them a Facebook ad saying that product is in stock near them, ready to be picked up.

4. Optimize their journey

People move very easily from one screen to another, from one channel to another. Is your brand just as fluid from one environment to another? To be there for your customers, you must build consumer experiences around moments, which occur fractionally, on all possible screens. One idea is to use Hotjar, a very smart tool that you can use for free to start with, which shows you what users are doing on your site. This will allow you not only to measure but also to optimize the user experience on your site.

5. Measure every important moment

You cannot afford not to live up to expectations just because you don’t yet know how to measure whether what you’ve already done is effective or not. Find the metrics along the way that will help you and train your team to think the same way. Old indicators are no longer relevant; now you can refer to indicators such as “share of shelf attention” or “share of intent” (meaning how many times you appear in consumer searches).

CASE STUDY: SEPHORA

The Sephora team noticed how often customers used their mobile phones to search for something while they were in the store. Even though they could have thought that visitors were looking for competitors’ products, those at Sephora asked people in the stores what they were looking for, in order to meet their needs.

That’s how they found out that most were actually looking for reviews of products in the store or trying to remember what makeup shades they had bought last time. With this information at hand, Sephora developed new features in the mobile site and app to serve visitors exactly in these moments.

So, micro-moments… So what?

According to the MKOR study, 14% of mall visitors research the stores and products they will visit before leaving home.

11% search for information about a product directly on their phone while in the store.

Micro-moments are the new battlefield for brands. And, even if they are called “micro”, they are not small at all!

Follow the presentation slides below: