CMOs Are Missing Trends In Digital Marketing Micro-Moment By Micro-Moment

CMO is the abbreviation of Chief Marketing Officer, who is responsible for the for overseeing marketing initiatives within an organization. Works to develop areas such as sales management, product development, and distribution channel management, marketing communications, including advertising and promotions, pricing, market research, and customer service. Yet, CMOs should have a new definition of Chief Moment Officers because they need to focus more on the interaction with the customers and what is called the “micro-moment”.

Micro-moments are intent-rich, reflexive moments when people reach for the nearest device-often their smartphones. Nevertheless, when it comes to digital marketing, too many CMOs push off mobile and put less weight on the usage of apps and other functions of the smartphones. Mobile’s role in the digital marketing ecosystem is often regarded as a potable version of the desktop web, it is reasonably believed that using mobile phones to spread ads and publish brand names is one of the most, even the most, efficient way of increasing traffic and brand awareness. Yet, mobile ads spend still lags behind with total Internet spend of approximately $50 billion of which mobile only represents $13 billion.  The problem is that mobile apps are designed to reshape how consumers search and make decisions about brands when purchasing or following what they are interested in. By micro-moments, I mean the clicks consumers make when browsing the apps, and reflexive moments when people reach for the nearest device-often their smartphones. Those moments of “I-want-to-do” and “I-want-to-buy” are the simple terms that Google used to describe micro-moments.

It has been proved, according to the article, that almost half of the customers expect a page to load in under 2 seconds; 29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app. Of those who switch, 67% switch if a mobile site or app takes too many steps to purchase or get desired information and 77% switch if a mobile site or app does not make it easy to find what they’re looking for. Therefore, CMOs must fully understand what their customers want and not to expect them as smart as themselves are by simply make the app easy to use and precisely satisfy their needs. A great example is Pinterest, which is an app that I recently started to follow and found really attractive after finding out how it knows my mind and help me categorize my interests. By simply entering what I’m looking for (e.g. baked potatoes), then all the recipes and restaurants that serve the best rated baked potatoes are presented with mouth-watering pictures and detailed yet simple recipes. An app is successful when you keep using it without the conscious of time lapse.

Therefore, for CMOs to win in these moments, simply start by understanding what these micro-moments look like for your business and the demands of the customers; once the answers are found, then anticipate future potential needs and design for them, eliminate and optimize app steps, reward customer engagement in every moment, bring together a cross-functional group of strategies to collaborate and align, and finally make the right investments in talent and technology. The key is learning to efficiently use resources and mobilizing them to earn attention in every micro-moment when it comes to advertisements and brand promotion.

Sources: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2015/10/15/cmos-are-missing-trends-in-digital-marketing-micro-moment-by-micro-moment/

Shazam Your Wine to Become an Expert in Vine

A PSFK article "Shazam Your Wine to Become an Expert in Vine" does not only have a catchy title but also covers a very interesting app, Delectable.

The app used to identify a wine, rate and share your drinking experiences with fellow Dionysoses. The updated version now allows users to "shazam" a wine and add it to your history under the titles: Top Styles, Regions, Top Rated Wines, and Drinks With."

To me, this is a flag for Google as an example of the increase in mobile, in-app searches as opposed go googling things as default. It will be interesting to observe how Google will address this challenge.

Twitter is taking a page out of Facebook and Google's playbook

According to Business Insider, Twitter will soon be changing its terms of service so that it can monitor the other apps that users have on their phones. There are major privacy and user experience issues that arise with this new policy. Ultimately, it comes down to a universal technology dilemma: How much control will we give technology to improve how it serves us?

Twitter contests that it can make better products and better understands the needs of its customer by being able to track what apps its users are also interacting with; however, Twitter won't have access to the actual content that user access in other apps. Twitter makes the case that other technology companies such as Facebook and Google already have much more access to user data; in fact, Facebook has started to replicate Google's search model where users remain within the Facebook app when they access outside content.

Obviously, Twitter believes it needs to keep up with these other tech behemoths to predict what is "the next big thing". While this can be a great development for small upstarts looking to be acquired, it also presents an unfair advantage given that Twitter and Facebook have the ability to quickly replicate services and products it deems to be threats.