Four new consumer moments have forever changed how we should be marketing.

~ By Heidi Schwende

As a Google Global Premier Partner Agency, I can tell you that we are re-educating ourselves at a frenetic pace all the time. Learning is daily and ongoing. We engage daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly with Google to keep current.

There’s no possible way that any individual company whose core competency isn’t digital marketing can keep up with the speed at which the digital landscape is changing.  And on June 3, 2015, this was abundantly clear yet again.

WSI Digital Moxie Inc. invited roughly 100 business owners, executives and marketing leaders to our first digital breakfast of the season at Google’s Canadian headquarters in downtown Toronto.  As always, Google greeted us with a wonderful hot and cold breakfast buffet and then treated us to the very latest findings from their data.  And let me tell you, it was something!

There are now four consumer moments that no marketer can or should ignore — I want to know moments, I want to go moments, I want to do moments and I want to buy moments.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  Not so fast.  Making digital marketing easy is incredibly hard and being there for these four moments is going to take a lot of strategizing and exceptionally well-executed mobile marketing.  Here’s why:

  • 65% of online consumers look up more information online now versus a few years ago
  • 66% of smartphone users turn to their phones to look up something they saw in a TV commercial
  • There’s been a two-fold increase in “near me” search interest in the past year and 82% of smartphone users turn to a search engine when looking for a local business
  • 91% of smartphone users turn to their phones for ideas while doing a task
  • 100M+ hours of “how-to” content has been watched on YouTube so far this year
  • 82% of smartphone users consult their phones while in a store and deciding what to buy, and there’s been a 29% increase in mobile conversion rates in the past year

These micro-moments are the new battleground for brands and it doesn’t matter if you’re a business-to-consumer business or a business-to-business brand.  Everyone who is a buyer is on a mobile device at least 10 times a day.

A lot of you may be thinking that this digital economy is really only for the high-tech sector. Not so at all.  Seventy-five percent of the digital economy is delivered by traditional companies in traditional industries as we learned from our founding partner, Dan Monaghan.  The biggest mistake leaders often make is to choose tactics before strategy when it comes to promoting their business.

The really big opportunity right now is in the mobile space.  Your audience, smartphone users, are spending 24 percent of their time on mobile digital media consumption and only eight percent of advertisers are engaging with them via that medium.  With total internet ad spending at $50B US, of which mobile advertising accounts for $13B US, that leaves us with an incredible $25B US opportunity.

But before you go off and say we need to be doing mobile advertising, first take a step back and find out more about your personas.  What is their intent, who are they, what do they do, where are they found, what are they talking about and where have they been. The only way to do this is with a well-thought-out, incredibly well-planned and exceptionally well-executed digital marketing strategy.

To learn more about what you can do for your business, get in touch with milos@becmag.com and he’ll make sure that there’s a seat reserved for you at the next WSI Digital Marketing Breakfast with Google to be held on July 8, 2015.

About the author: Heidi Schwende is the Chief Digital Officer at WSI Digital Moxie Inc. She has extensive experience working with Fortune 500 companies in the technology and energy sectors as well as experience working with key organizations in verticals such as mobile technology, loyalty, pharmaceuticals and retail. Heidi also sits on the Technology Advisory Board for the CSAE, the Institute for Human Resources, Social Media and Employee Communications Technology Advisory Board and is Board Vice-President Web Development for Image Impact International. In addition to her LinkedIn profile, you can also interact with Heidi on her Twitter account @WSIDigitalMoxie.