by Deni Kaziyska, contributor to Digital Doughnut
The journey for the modern consumer has evolved to a point where a simple buyer persona research is not enough. Implementing Micro-Moments research will help companies to achieve outstanding results, to attract new customers, and drive sales.
Today’s customer interactions with brands have multiplied in comparison to a few years back. A customer might discover a brand through social media and follow its page, reads a post with a call-to-action at the end, and it’s then when the user decides to buy a product.
There are multiple steps in between the first point of contact, or the discovery phase, and the final sale. This is also known as the customer journey. The journey of this modern consumer is not linear anymore, instead, it is formed by multiple fragments of connectivity and interactions known as active micro-moments.
By knowing when, how, where and why users interact with brands, companies can shift their entire strategy to be customer-centric, resulting in less time and money spent on trying to reach audiences that were never interested in their product or service.
Buyer Persona Research vs Micro-Moments Research
Creating a buyer persona is an essential step when trying to understand the customer journey of your company. It provides detailed insights and a structure to your marketing and business strategy. By gaining a deep understanding of your customers, you can create more effective marketing messaging and inspire product development that fulfills a need for your customers.
Nevertheless, nowadays knowing your buyer personas is not enough. In fact, the buyer personas research is part of much bigger and deeper research: the active micro-moments research.
Today’s customer journey is made of multiple touchpoints and micro-moments. By applying the insights from your buyer personas to each stage of the journey, you can attract new customers and drive sales.
Micro-Moments Research
Google was the first to come up with the micro-moments term. They described them as small, intent-driven actions of digitally connected users, each of which offers an opportunity for brands to influence consumer decisions. They divided the micro-moments into four examples, or actions of intent: I want to know moments, I want to go moments, I want to buy moments, and I want to do moments.
By having a deeper look into how your customers engage with micro-moments, you will be able to plot out your marketing strategy to engage potential customers as they progress through each stage of the customer journey. This will help your brand to provide exceptional customer experience and fit your marketing efforts to deliver an exceptional ROI.
In this micro-moments video, it is better explained why incorporating them into your marketing strategy is fundamental for surviving in this era of the hyperconnected consumer and how it helps to bridge the digital gap.
The best way of incorporating active micro-moments into your marketing strategy is by conducting an active micro-moment research, and today we have outlined how to do it in six steps.
1. Know Your Buyer Personas
Knowing your buyer personas with accuracy is a critical step to be able to outline your customer journey and to define the brief micro-moments of connectivity. Buyer personas are created from data on your customer demographics, goals, fears, motivations, behavior, and preferences.
2. Conduct Research and Interviews
Micro-moments research should be based on real data. Guessing can result in inaccurate profiles, which will certainly affect your marketing campaigns and audience targeting. Research and surveys are ideal for data collection from your digital channels like your website and social media. This data will also be essential to help you determine the four actions of intent in the buyer’s journey.
3. Deep SEO Research
A very important aspect to consider when conducting micro-moments research for your company is your consumer’s intent and context. You should be able to understand the users’ search intentions when searching for your service or product. With deep SEO research, you can aim to recognize the root of the real intention behind a user’s search query, align it with your company’s intentions and develop the right content that will answer all their concerns.
Take into consideration that user’s searches have shifted from short-tail to long-tail, conversational questions, and other developments like voice search and AI, have amplified the importance of micro-moments marketing.
4. Micro-Moments Mapping
Mapping the customer journey is a very helpful way of visualizing it while making all the insights obtained more digestible. By mapping micro-moments, you will obtain a greater understanding of how your customers are interacting and engaging with your brand. You will also be able to tap into their thought processes at each stage, meet their demands as they search for answers on the go, anticipate the search query, and create content they will find relevant.
5. Hypothesis and Testing
Trial and improvement are some of the fundamentals of digital marketing, and it’s something that should also be applied when conducting micro-moments research. Define your hypothesis within your strategy based on your buyer personas and the customer journey. What do you think will be the key micro-moments for the users of this journey? How are you going to be there for them to fulfill their needs and offer the ultimate customer experience? Marketing is all about testing and optimizing, which is what takes us to our sixth and last step.
6. Continuous Monitoring of Micro-Moments
As consumers utilize new ways to interact with their devices like voice search, micro-moments and the behaviors that have developed as a result of the mobile age will only become more prevalent. As machine learning and data analysis become more advanced and sophisticated at helping the everyday consumer, people will become even more demanding of brands to deliver relevant, helpful, and personalized experiences.
Conclusion
The journey for the modern consumer has evolved to a point where simple buyer persona research is not enough to be able to outline it. Marketers need to dive into deeper research that takes into consideration all the micro-moments users experience along their journey. Successful companies will also need to stay one step ahead of their consumers, have a deep understanding of their customers and know their needs, and for this a micro-moment research is essential.
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