Mobile Phones Are The Next Marketing Frontier

Most marketers generally understand what their customers want and need. They also spend a lot of time and energy gaining insight to understand how they can connect with these customers. They, as a result, and use these insights gained to develop great stories. At the end of the day, they see movement whether in terms of sales or RoI. While it is evident some may not understand the RoI, they still know and understand what has worked over the years.

How Brands Grow – What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp truisms, as quoted by Agnes Gathaiya, the Google Country Director during the Africa MarTech Summit, remain, well, true. He notes that there is a unique category in marketing that are called light users.

According to a research paper titled Heavy vs. Light Users: A Preliminary Study of Behavior Patterns in Consumers of Retail Services from the Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, 2012, “Light users tend to concentrate their purchases in a smaller number of brands than do heavy users, indicating higher loyalty levels in light users.” Curiously enough, further research has also indicated that marketing ought to target light users and non-users when it comes to brands.

This means how can marketers find people who are not necessarily using their products and who are not, in fact, advocates. How does one speak to all the customers even as they acquire new ones? Especially prior to purchase and just when they are about to make a purchasing decision. How can a marketer be there for this moment and make it easier for customers to remember, find and buy their product? Be top of mind.

“Acquisition is at the back of our minds every single day. How do I stand out in an increasingly cluttered marketplace? And how can I measure results, RoI?” posits Agnes.

Customers are certainly changing, something that has been accelerated by the pandemic, but would have eventually evolved into anyway. “Some of our brands have been in the market for years. Some for 50 years. But how our customers are finding us, and how our customers are buying, is changing every single day. Our customers no longer go online. They live online. More and more people are spending their time on their mobile phones.”

YouTube, for instance, is the second-largest video channel in Kenya with 7.7 million active users per month, compared with our traditional television stations. “This is telling us people are spending more time consuming data and consuming content on their mobile phones. That is where the growth is.

This presents what can best be defined as micro-moments. That moment where you need to make a decision, and right before you Google it. And when you Google it, options pop up. Are you one of the options that will stand out for potential customers? If someone searches for something you’re good at, will they find you? Will you meet them at their point of need? Think With Google describes it thus.

“But then there are the other moments—the I want-to-know moments, I want-to-go moments, I want-to-do moments, and I want-to-buy moments—that really matter. We call these “micro-moments,” and they’re game-changers for both consumers and brands.”

With life being lived on the move inside our mobile phones, the micro-moments marketing model is designed to meet the consumer’s high expectations. “Today, our customers want to watch that video now on how to fix something that is ailing them. They want to know now information they are looking for to solve a specific problem. Once they have found it, they make a purchasing decision immediately. The question is, are you there?”

There is another question Agnes asks too. “The people who searched, who did they find?”

It turns out when people go online for a search they are actually not brand conscious. They are looking for information to inform their buying decision. Is your information going to be found?

Here is an example. In Q4 2020 there were 1 million searches for mobile loans in Kenya. 60 per cent of these searches were generic, meaning they were not searching for a specific brand. It raises the opportunity for people with mobile loan apps to be able to raise their market share. “These are our customers floating around the internet looking for information and content. How do we make information and content that meets them at their point of need when they need it? That is the shift in consumer behaviour that we are talking about.”

To succeed in a micro-moment world you need to; be there, be useful, be quick and finally, connect the dots. “If you want to win in mobile, this is what we all have to do. Mobile is the new Northstar for marketers. If you are not winning on mobile, then you are leaving market share on the table.”