Micro moments: Discover how mobile is changing the experience journey

As mobile grows, so do our behaviours. We want to know the answer to our questions immediately and so we are becoming more impatient and impulsive. And all because of that little computer in our pockets, which opens up a whole world of possibilities to us. It changes our lives. A life in which we no longer have to dive into thick books, but can go looking for information whenever we want. And it is precisely these moments, also called micro moments, that are incredibly important for consumers these days. And thus also for you as a marketer. But how do you capitalise on every microsecond of someone's life?

What are micro moments?

Although Google introduced micro moments back in 2016, so the theory is no longer all that new, it is still just as relevant. And with the growth of mobile, perhaps even more relevant. With our mobiles by our side 24/7, our lives are changing. This little device helps us explore, find and share new ideas, brands and solutions. Thus, we have countless interactions per day; research shows that we even check our phone 58 times a day¹, which amounts to more than 3 hours of looking at your smartphone². Think about sending messages, scanning a work email or posting that one cute photo. These are countless micro moments when we use our mobile, but not necessarily the ones when you are sitting around waiting for a company to intrude.

The micro moments that do interest companies are the moments when we are looking for more information. Need help to make choices. Here you can think of reviews, explainer videos, opening hours or the nearest restaurant. These micro moments are the moments in which we get more information at a glance or give us an opportunity to respond directly. They are the interactions we want at that moment. To capitalise on this as a business, it is essential to know what drives your target audience. In a previous blog, you can find out more about finding out what drives your focus target groups using the BSR™ model.

According to Google, all micro moments can be categorised into one of the following four moments:

• I-want-to-know moments: moments when someone is researching or discovering something, but is not yet ready to make a purchase. For example, this is when people are looking for more information about a product, or something to solve their problem.
• I-want-to-go moments: When someone is looking for a local business or is considering buying something from a nearby shop.
• I-want-to-buy moments: Someone is ready to make a purchase, but still needs help deciding exactly what to buy or how to buy it. These moments can happen even while people are already in the shop where they are going to make purchase. For example, 82% of smartphone users say that while they are in the shop to make their purchase, they still reach for their mobile to look up more information about the purchase³. 
• I-want-to-do moments: moments when someone needs help to complete a task or try something new. For example, think of looking up 'How to' videos while you're busy putting together that new wardrobe. Or searching for how to make that delicious tomato sauce again while you are making pasta. Elongated user manuals and thick recipe books are now a thing of the past.

Micro moments and the experience journey

Micro moments happen at every stage of the experience journey, and the two are themselves inextricably linked. The experience journey, better known as the customer journey, is the journey your customers, guests or patients go through before, during and after a purchase or visit. Because we take action with micro moments the moment a question or idea comes to us, the phases of the experience journey are divided into thousands of small decision moments. And thus thousands of moments when we interact with an organisation. Micro moments can also be seen as the touchpoints we encounter in the experience journey framework, and these go far beyond mobile alone. Micro moments and touchpoints span across different screens, devices and channels. And in each step of the experience journey, you need to make sure you are seen as a business. Not only that, you need to make sure you stand out and offer the best experience to your customers; from picking that one movie in the cinema to booking the holiday. Understanding the micro moments and capitalising on them will increase your mobile conversions by up to 29%⁴, and make you more relevant to your target audience.

Getting started with the experience journey and planning your content?

Then read this blog.

From micro moments to travel moments

Logically, micro moments can be used for any industry. For instance, shortly after announcing their micro moments, Google discovered travel moments. The micro moments that occur specifically in the travel industry. After all, such a large repeat 'purchase' as a holiday - almost 60% of holidaymakers spend the most on holiday⁵ out of all repeat purchases - naturally needs to be well researched and has its own unique customer journey. For example, 40% of travellers say they go back and forth between all the choices and detailed search⁶. With more and more research being done before people travel, more micro moments are emerging in the travel business. Moments in which preferences are formed and decisions are made. 

Moments in which preferences are formed and decisions are made.

Take Amy, for example, who is planning a trip to Disney World⁷. In collaboration with Luth Research, Google researched her journey across the digital landscape. In her digital experience journey, Amy made 34 searches, watched 5 videos and visited 380 web pages in two months. Of all 419 digital moments, 87% happened on mobile. If your organisation is not visible and relevant during all these moments, you are missing out on an awful lot of valuable potential customers.

And travel moments therefore start the moment someone dreams of going on a trip and they go right up to the moment the trip actually begins. Google believes that each of these micro moments can be subdivided into one of the following four travel moments:

• I-want-to-get-away moments (dreaming moments): the moments when people explore different destinations to go on a trip, without knowing for sure when and if they will book something. This stage focuses more on finding inspiration.
• Time-to-make-a-plan moments (planning moments): People have chosen a destination and start looking for further travel information: holiday dates, the right flight, accommodation, etc. At this stage, search is the most common way to discover a brand.
• Let's-book-it moments (booking moments): the research is over and people are ready to finally book their tickets and accommodation.
• Can't-wait-to-explore moments (experiencing moments): When the trip is finally there, people start looking to add extra enrichment to their trip. They book activities that complete their dream trip.

Travel moments from Sterc

At Sterc we dived deep into Google's travel moments, and actually one big thing struck us: what happens during and after people travel? How do they experience the stay itself, what do people look for, and does this experience favour a continuation in a subsequent holiday? That's why we took Google's travel moments and expanded them further. In fact, with an eye on inbound marketing (providing relevant information to your target audience, in order to attract them to your organisation), you want to make sure you put the customer at the centre, at every step of their experience journey. 

At Sterc, therefore, in addition to dreaming, planning, booking and experiencing moments, we have come up with some additional moments that definitely apply to the industry:

• The-moment moments (staying moments): Actually staying in a hotel, campsite, region, island, park or culture. The staying moments can again be divided into three smaller moments:
  • Arrival moments: arriving at the destination. Here, people can orient themselves, for example, on where the reception is, where to park their car and whether they can store their luggage somewhere in between before they can enter the room.
  • Staying moments: The actual stay, many visitors only really begin to discover here what they can do during their stay. Questions are therefore: what is there to do? Where can I go with my questions? How does the jacuzzi work? Where can I get a taxi? So to be visible, local SEO is incredibly important here.
  • Departure moments: You are going back home, and still have the last questions: where should I return keys? What time does my transfer to the airport leave?
• Fully-charged moments (afterwards moments): After your stay, you are fully recharged and ready to get back to work. Yet you still regularly think back to that wonderful trip. While the guest is still in that happy state-of-mind, you as a marketer can capitalise on this perfectly by sending an e-mail in which they can quickly leave a review. 
• I-need-to-tell-everyone-moments (sharing moments): The trip went so well, you want to let other people know about it too. If everything went well, the fast becomes true ambassadors of the brand at this stage. Where can they leave their review? Can they already book a new holiday? Do you offer them discounts on holidays in other locations?

As you can see, we deploy Google's travel moments in such a way that it parallels the experience journey. This not only allows you to better respond to the customer's questions and needs during and after their stay, but also maps out how you, as a marketer, can respond to each stage of the stay.

Create your own micro moments strategy

Although micro moments happen in mere milliseconds in front of our noses, they are unique contact moments in which marketers and organisations need to be relevant. They need to directly answer the customer's question the moment they reach for their phone to trigger a micro moment. Because before you know it, the micro moment is over. When you focus on this, you can offer an extraordinary experience to your consumer. But how do you tackle this?

To stand out to your target audience in a micro moment, it is important to be relevant. Indeed, in the moment when people reach for their phones to search for something, 65% look for the most relevant information, despite the company offering it³. To be relevant in such a micro moment, Google says you have to be fast and present, or in their own words 'be there, be useful and be quick'. They explain this strategy as follows:

• Be there: You need to respond to micro moments and be constantly engaged with them so that, when the micro moments occur, you are there to help the customer further.
• Be useful: As mentioned earlier, 65% of people look at the most relevant information. You need to make sure you have the right answer right away or help guide people to the right page.
• Be quick: Micro moments are fast. Mobile users want to know, go, do or buy quickly. You therefore need to provide them with a flawless experience. 

Perhaps you can capitalise on this with different tools and content to create your micro moments strategy.

Be there

Most micro moments happen on mobile, so it is crucial to provide a good mobile experience. This not only means that your mobile website should be mobile-friendly, but also that you appear in mobile results. 1 in 3 smartphone users have made a purchase, from a different brand than they intended to make their purchase, purely because the other company offered the information they needed at that moment³. We see in practice that with tourism platforms, mobile usage often rises above 60% already, tablet hovers between 10 and 15% and the remainder comes in via desktop.

Learn more about mobile and how you can capitalise on it?

Read our blogs on mobile.

By being there when consumers need it, you not only help them with their decision-making process, but also yourself by making customers trust your brand more. How do you check this? Grab your mobile and search for keywords that are relevant for your business to appear in search results. Do this in both Google and YouTube. Also check how your competitors are doing and how you both are doing on desktop as well. Based on this, you can create a share of intent graph, which shows to what extent you versus your competitors were there and how often not.

Important tips to be there

1. Be visible and findable on mobile; this is the most important device, especially for micro moments
2. In the first phase of travel moments, people often do not yet know exactly where they want to travel to and when. It is important to capitalise on these moments by visually showing what destinations look like, create vlogs and try to describe the atmosphere and experience as clearly as possible. Think romantic destinations for honeymoons, for example, and sunny trips for summer.
3. People also search for local businesses. Therefore, make sure you are findable by setting up Google My Business properly, for example. Read more about local SEO in our blog. 
4. Make sure you easily direct people to the service that helps people further. For example, hang QR codes or NFC tags, which lead people to more explanations in a scan. You can find more about deploying QR and NFC in our blog 
5. Look what channels are being searched on, and make sure you are visible there. For example, for the travel industry, Google has introduced Hotel Ads and Google Flights.

Be useful

1. But just being visible won't get you there. Because once you are visible then, but people find your information totally irrelevant, they leave even faster than they came. Only 9% of users stay or a mobile website or app that does not meet their needs³. So it is important that you provide relevant information for every micro moment or guide them easily to this information. And this is how you do it:
2. To help people navigate to the right content on your platform, a chatbot can be ideal. The chatbot helps visitors get to where they need to be 24/7. An FAQ page helps visitors find known questions and the answers to them. Not only does this get them to relevant information faster, but FAQ pages also increase the chances of a featured snippet.
3. When people are looking for a physical shop to buy a specific product, it is essential that you show where you are located, your opening hours and how much you still have in stock of that product (so people don't come to your business for nothing).
4. More and more people are looking for explainer videos, also called how to videos. This shows them step by step how to do something, without reading a long sequence of content. Of course, you can also incorporate this into an infographic or share a step-by-step blog.
5. Give people the option to quickly re-order from their previous order, or offer discounts on products/brands they have used before.

Be quick

Micro moments are not called that for nothing; people want an answer to their question or to be navigated through something as quickly as possible. 60% say they have even made a decision faster because they have researched everything beforehand³. Because of this, consumers expect your mobile platform to be as quick and easy as possible, with as few steps as possible to get to their goal. And you do that in the following way:

1. Discover what purpose visitors go to your website with and look at how many steps they need to take, to get there. Then make sure you minimise these steps by shortening forms, adding progressive form fields,  fly-out forms, personalisation, or adding useful features such as an address API link that auto-completes the street name with postcode and house number or Click2Call buttons.
2. The most important activities visitors need to perform on your website should be given a prominent place. Preferably behind an eye-catching call to action.
3. Show location-based information so that people get to where they want to be in just a few steps. For example, they can instantly see the stock of the shop near them.
4. Of course, the speed of your mobile platform is also incredibly important. 53% will leave your website if loading takes longer than 3 seconds. Want to know how fast your website is now? Then use Google's Pagespeed tool⁸. To make your website faster, you can choose to load only the content currently displayed on the screen (lazy load) or create an Accelerated Mobile Page. Of course, you can also choose a CMS that is already incredibly fast, such as MODX. Of course, we are happy to help you with that. You can read more about MODX and speed in this blog.

To capitalise on your target audience's micro moments and strategise on them, it is important to go through the following steps:

• Look at the search intent of your target audience. What do they want to find out or do? Look at the main search results, trends (Google Trends) and questions relevant to your organisation or industry. You can find more about generating queries in this blog.
• Create content for different channels and devices with which you provide your target group with relevant information. At each stage of the customer journey. It is important to first focus on the micro moments that you as an organisation really can't miss.
• Make sure the different phases of the experience journey are connected, so that you offer your visitors a flawless experience. To further enhance this flawless experience and cater to each segment of your target audience, you can personalise your digital platform. For example, is different information more relevant to show outside opening hours or in a different season? Or show a different CTA for people at a different stage of the customer journey.

And this is how you yourself can get started mapping your own micro moments and creating a matching strategy on them. In our revamped Sterce model we go into this in more detail, so you can create a strategy that helps you achieve your goals.