In the internet age, buying decisions are made across many micro-moments.
In this episode of our Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Perficient Digital’s Mark Traphagen explains what a micro-moment is, and why understanding how to be present in them can make all the difference to your marketing.
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Transcript
What Are Micro-moments?
Eric: Mark, what are micro-moments, and why do they matter to content marketing?
Mark: Micromoments are Google’s term for the way that people come into contact with business content today.
Eric: And what’s changed?
Mark: The biggest change in recent years is that people are increasingly more likely to seek out information during their journey to a purchase on devices other than a desktop computer, such as smartphones, or the newer personal digital assistants, like Google Home or Amazon Echo.
Mobile Micro-moments and Content Marketing
Eric: And how does that change content marketing?
Mark: Well, that’s where the micro-moments concept comes in. Now, not all that long ago, if you were researching a potential purchase, you probably did it through a desktop search. And you’d probably end up browsing a number of webpages, but now with smartphones and PDAs with us all the time, we’re likely to look on those devices. And we want a quick, decisive answer.
We don’t want to wade through a bunch of webpages, and on some of those devices, seeing webpages isn’t even possible. So with those devices, usually, we’re asking very specific questions, and we want to get one good, concise answer. So, a micro-moment then is any moment where a consumer thinks of something they want to know more about, explore more, or even purchase. And they go to whatever device is at hand to get that answer.
[Tweet “A marketing micro-moment occurs when a consumer has a specific question about a product or service. “]
How to Create Mobile-Friendly Micro-moment Content
Eric: So how does that affect how we should create content then?
Mark: It means we can’t just rely on one-size-fits-all, generic content anymore. We have to try to think like our prospects and anticipate what they will want to see or know before they make a purchase decision. Then we have to create content that addresses those different micro-moments, and optimize it so that the consumer is more likely to get it in response to his or her query in that micro-moment.
[Tweet “Micro-moment content addresses specific needs consumers have along their customer journeys. More at”]
Eric: What kinds of content work for these micro-moments?
Mark: First off, it should be mobile-friendly content since, as we have said, more and more micro-moment queries happen on mobile devices. So, it needs to be content that is easy to read and scan on a mobile screen. Short-form videos, for example, can be great micro-moment content.
On smartphones, people are more likely to watch a short video than read a blog post, and with the short-form video, it can be relatively easy to spin out a bunch out of them that address all the different micro-moment questions your prospects might have.
Eric: What about for search engines?
Mark: With mobile devices and personal digital assistants, what you’ve called the “one answer” is becoming more important. That is, because of the size of the screen on mobile devices, or for other devices the fact that there’s no screen at all, the answer is going to come by a voice response, and people want to get one concise answer.
Now, with the rich answers in search, and featured snippets, in particular, we’ve seen Google and Bing actively seeking out, and surfacing those one answers from web sources. You’ve written some excellent studies and guides about how to get those featured snippets on our blog.
Now, of course, there are lots of other ways to come up with and create micro-moment content. Google has some great resources about this on its “Think with Google” site.
Eric: Thanks, Mark.
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Because it is more important than to do just advertising we can reach to many people as we can through this.
Could Google’s *wink wink* be any more obvious to marketers? Be useful and be quotable if you want position 0 in Google.