Rethinking the Customer Journey: Micro Moments for digital marketing in 2020.

A customer journey is a model that helps businesses make sense of a consumers decision making and consumption behaviour. On the whole this provides marketers with the information they need to better meet customer demands and guide them through to sales.

In the past marketers perceived the traditional customer journey as completely linear, where a consumer was pushed in a row, through a funnel into purchase. Typically, these were made up of 5 or 6 stages: Awareness – Consideration – Purchase – Loyalty and Advocacy (or some variant). The job of the marketer was to meet the customer, by creating content that answered questions or provided information at various stages of the buyer journey. Once a customer was in your funnel, you would try and push them down towards sales.

Marketers would attempt to push them consumers various stages of the buyer funnel by providing stage relevant content and information.

The customer journey in 2020, is a more moldable one, a model that is non-linear but typically still made up of 5 core buyer stages. The modern customer journey is either inter-connected across the 5 stages, with each person journeying differently or an infinity loop of continued advocacy and awareness from new customers.

The content creation models for the buyer journey have also evolved, largely due to mobile devices, to become touch-points through micromoments. Your brand has never been so accessible and so scrutinised by potential customers at critical points in the buyer journey than today. Access has never been so great and consumer have never been so empowered.

In the words of Google “An intent-rich moment when a person turns to a decide to act on a need – to know, go, do, or buy.”

As a brand, you want to be present at all phases of the customer journey, not just at the buying end (admittedly where the biggest opportunity exists), but throughout their decision making process. A micro moment is a digital touchpoint, between you and the customer, where the customer reflexively turns to a device (usually a smartphone) to act on a need to either know something, go somewhere, do something or buy something. These micro moments represent the cornerstone of Mobile advertising.

In the I-want-to-know moments, the consumer is browsing for information and researching possibilities. This is early in the conversion funnel, and although they aren’t necessarily in full purchase mode, they are looking for useful information, educational resources and inspiration. These are really powerful touchpoint opportunities for growing brand awareness and getting inside the customer’s consideration set.

In the I-want-to-go moments, when someone is searching for a local business, possibly considering buying a product near your location. Google search interest in “near me” has increased 34X since 2011 and has doubled since last year. In these “I want-to-go moments”, consumers aren’t just getting information but often making buying decisions and heading straight to stores.

• 50% of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a store within a day, 18% of those lead to purchase within a day.

Micro moments happen in an instant but winning in these moments ensure customers remember you and come to your store.

I-Want-to-Do moments may come before or after the purchase. Typically, these are “How to” searches often on YouTube often looking for informational and educational resources. These are opportunities for brands, to assist people on how to get things done.

• General Knowledge: How to remove a stain?
• Food: Searching for a recipe?
• Beauty: How to apply mascara?
• Home: How to unblock a drain?

This micro-moment is useful to brands as you are meeting the informational demands of your potential consumer base.

I-Want-to-buy moments: the holy grail and finally the point of purchase. In these moments, consumers are looking to be sold on your brand or product – so much so that 82% of smartphone users consult their phones before making a purchase, while mobile-commerce has also grown 29%.

From an Advertising perspective you can go with Google Ads Shopping listing, allowing them to buy online – or create content based on “Reviews of….”, “The best … for……”, “product A vs product B” etc.,

In 2020 and beyond a more cyclical, inclusive approach to marketing is what will win out. We can no longer treat customers and visitors as merely events that happen inside our funnel. We need to think about our entire marketing strategy and all the potential content options and touch-points a customer will browse – based on their own micromoments and journey.

Aware offer a suite of Google Ads Management solutions. We can offer consultancy, management as a service and handle all your creative assets.