Micro-Moments from Google

As a recent attendee of ClickZ NYC, I was intrigued when Google began talking about micro-moments in their presentations. These micro-moments, Google stated, were key behavior moments in a person's day. These moments Google broke down into 4 buckets:

1. I want to Know.
2. I want to Go.
3. I want to Do.
4. I want to Buy.

Because of technology, consumer behavior has changed. The days of relying on word of mouth haven't disappeared, they've just taken a back seat in the decision-making timeline. Put it this way, how many times have you grabbed your phone to search for something on a whim? I know I've looked for goods and services plus travel deals. I've also looked for something a little more laser-focused like restaurants near me. I didn't know it then but I just fell into the 4 buckets mentioned above. I wanted to know, to go, to do and to buy. I wasn't able to tickle my fancy in such an immediate way prior to always having the internet in my pocket. Before that, I'd have to drive somewhere to inquire about whatever I was looking into. Sure, I could call but I'm a tactile person. 'Smartphones allow us to act on any impulse at any time.' This could be like I mentioned before, to end an argument, to look for a recipe, it doesn't matter. Whatever you want to know, almost all of it is a click away. Sometimes it's more than a click away and sometimes you have to look at more than a few websites to find what you're looking for. At that point, your micro-moment becomes macro and your passion to find what you're looking for turns into frustration. It's our job as marketers and designers to make sure our audience never hits that macro-moment. But what if you don't have a bevy of designers and marketers working for you and you have to do it alone? It will take some time, but you can do it and here's one way.

Develop Buyer Personas

Every buyer has a persona and the more niche your service or product, the more narrow your buyer's persona is. Put another way, if you're Coca-Cola, your buyer persona is varied. If you make men's raw denim jeans, you're going to have a better idea of who buys yours product. A lot of times, companies get so used to speaking their own way that they forget that their customers speak a different way. Figuring out your buyer's persona or personas will better equip you in making the right content choices for your website.

So how does this all add up?

I guarantee you that if you created 2 pages on your site that were identical in how they looked but one page was written in the way your company speaks and the other written for your buyer persona, the latter page would outperform the former by leaps and bounds. But buyer personas doesn't just stop with using the right language. It also helps if your design is visually engaging to your end user. Yahoo!, Google and others have run tests on various types of online ads and have realized that the ones that speak to the end user's emotions rather than the product has a greater conversion rate than the product. That's because the most important thing to the end user is themselves. People want to find something they relate to, i.e. they want to find themselves. If they can relate, they begin to trust, and that trust just might turn into a sale. Well, that is if you've figured out their micro-moments. For more on micro-moments check out Google's site. Jason McElweenie Digital Marketing Specialist jason [at] blueskymkt.com