Succeeding in Micro-Moments

When people reach for their mobile devices to find information they need at the moment, is your brand there? If not, you could be missing out on countless of opportunities to connect. With the importance of smartphones in daily life growing all the time, your brand needs to be there for micro-moments to stay relevant.

What Is a Micro-Moment?

Micro-moments occur all day, every day. When someone picks up their smartphone or tablet to look up information online, that’s a micro-moment. We live in a demand-oriented age, where consumers use smart phones on the go to conduct a business choice that used to take hours. A consumer can now grab a phone, make a search which leads to a wealth of information including ratings and reviews, and act upon that information very quickly.

Micro-moments are a part of daily life, and they are an important marketing opportunity. Every micro-moment is an opportunity to get your brand’s content in front of potential customers. They are particularly important because consumers conducting mobile searches are poised to purchase – nearly 80 percent of local searches on mobile devices turned into purchases, with nearly 90 percent of those purchases being in a physical store.

Micro-moments are the culmination of the shift in marketing from pushing your brand into a consumer’s life via advertising to being there when a consumer looks for products or services in your category – and being the obvious choice when they do.

If you want to succeed in online marketing, you need to make the most of micro-moments, which present an opportunity to poach your competitor’s customers or convert the 90 percent of smartphone users who have no brand loyalty.

Micro-Moments Matter for Local Businesses

Eighty-two percent of smartphone users say they use their device to find local businesses. In order to be the business they choose when they pick up their devices and start searching, you need to get your brand to the top of the results for local Google search and platforms commonly used to find businesses, like Yelp and other review sites. Getting your business to the top of the search results can be very tough. A powerful way to get there is to take advantage of high search rankings within top review sites to position your brand highly in search engine results pages and apps that re-purpose those results, like maps.

Not only do more reviews get you to the top of search rankings in both Google and review apps like Yelp, but one of the things consumers are doing in these micro-moments is comparing you to your competition. Your star ratings will show in those searches right alongside your competition. If your rating is lower, you will lose business to those competitors with higher ratings.

Imagine a consumer conducting a search for Italian restaurants in your area. Your restaurant appears alongside other matching results and right there next to the search results is a star rating. If one of your competitors has four stars and you have three and a half, where would you go in similar circumstances? The same applies for salons, hotels, realtors, car mechanics and pretty much any local business.

Making the Most of Micro-Moments

Being the obvious choice to consumers is the key to winning business in micro-moments. That means being at the top of search results in both search engines and review sites, and having a higher star rating than the competitors that show up in the same searches.

RatingsMax is a managed service that delivers your business more and better reviews which leads to higher search rank which leads to more business.