Architecting effective mobile experiences is a huge task for marketers today. To be successful, marketers must rethink how mobile actually plays in the customer experience. After all, the person ultimately in control of the experience is the consumer. She or he decides whether to engage with a brand in. Mobile Moments – and that happens on the customer’s terms.
The mobile moment concept was born from the lightning-fast evolution of smartphone usage. A person’s smartphone is now a powerful digital companion commanding attention hundreds of times each day, empowering consumers to get information when they want it. They expect a fast, seamless experience.
The struggle: capturing attention in the moment
For now, we’ll look at capturing attention in the moment from a B2C perspective. We’ll cover B2B in a future post. In B2C, marketers now face a couple of unique challenges to engage consumers.
First, engagement is increasingly difficult: In most instances, brands still rely on lean media (email, static images, links, etc.) to drive people to a destination hoping to ignite engagement and conversion. Trouble is, the destination is typically an inflexible and expensive native app, landing page or the main website. Whatever the destination, few are designed around the consumer’s mobile moment and how they want to engage with content.
Think back to when websites were essentially brochureware. Marketers believed getting people to the website would somehow mystically create engagement. It was a start, but fell short in meeting consumers’ needs. Then came mobile apps. As we covered in an earlier post, the harsh reality is consumers spend nearly all of their app time within a handful of preferred apps, typically for social media, messaging and other personal activities. So even as brands Invest heavily in mobile apps, engagement is more elusive than ever.
Second, “serendipity shopping” is growing: Many marketers are still wedded to the notion that the consumer buying journey is always linear, meaning they go through a prescribed process before purchasing. The smartphone, however, can augment and enhance the journey, giving brands new opportunities to create a moment of meaningful connection with the customer.
Study after study shows people increasingly use smartphones to comparison shop, get product info and make purchases. But even within a physical store, marketers now have opportunities to create mobile moments to engage and empower consumers to make purchases with greater confidence. For example, rich content and offers can be served instantaneously based on where someone is in a mall or even within a store. As Millennials flood the marketplace, marketers need to adapt even faster to create powerful moments for the consumer – experiences they now expect.
To win the mobile battle for consumers, marketers must seize and create the moment. But doing so will require marketers to:
- Leave the past behind and rethink the need for expensive (and unused) native apps or brochureware microsites/web pages;
- Embrace the new power of consumers and welcome the reality of engaging, yet brief, mobile moments;
- Turn a problem into an opportunity by visualizing a new consumer encounter with the brand through a mobile device based on the way people actually interact with their smartphone;
Perform! With recent advancements in mobile technology, smart marketers will lead a transformation in the mobile experience by creating a richer, more immersive and engaging experience without the expense and time required of a native app.
Success will require a new marketing mindset about mobile moments overall. Doing so can help marketing pros bring the brand to life and gain intimate 1-to-1 smartphone screen time. People expect and crave mobile experiences that help them in the moment.
