Wellness marketing and the importance of brand micro-moments
It’s “cyber shopping” season. An appropriate time to remind wellness marketing teams that consumers turn to your brands when they need to, not when you want the sale (at least most of the time?). But it’s also important to remind that regardless of your particular wellness brands — whether diet, nutrition, skin care, beauty, spa, personal care — your prospective customer’s path to purchase is convoluted. They research, study, compare and query their way to the ideal purchase experience, and there are no shortage of product and service choices. For wellness marketing teams, this presents quite a challenge.
Wellness Marketing And Micro-Moments
The impact of the new shopper journey on the health and wellness industry is significant, as your ability to engage consumers with a consistent and compelling brand experience across multiple channels (brand micro-moments) is critical to meeting revenue targets. Because as a marketer, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. Your prospective customers are now behind the wheel. They dictate when and how they want to engage with brands, making the shopper’s journey less of a linear path. It’s for this reason that wellness marketing teams need to understand what micro-moments matter to customers so that their brand — out of the multitude of options — is considered, helpful and trusted.
Small Micro-Moments, Big Impact
Micro-moments are the small but precious occurrences throughout the shopper journey during which consumers are ready to act. They start when a customer turns to their mobile phone or other smart device. The challenge to wellness marketing teams is to maximize the value of each and every one of them. For your brand to prove it can fulfill a specific customer’s need at a given micro-moment.
Google narrows these moments down to four key categories:
1. want-to-know moments (the research and education phase of the customer journey)
2. want-to-go moments (when customers search for local places that offer specific products or services)
3. want-to-do moments (when a customer is ready to do something)
4. want-to-buy moments (when a customer is ready to buy)
Do you know how many micro-moments your prospective consumers engage with throughout their journey to purchase? In many cases, it’s likely in the double digits.
Know What Matters
Here are six tips to help wellness marketing teams maximize their brand’s micro-moments. They’re compliments of Molly Ware, senior interactive marketing lead at Goodyear (I always like to get outside the categories we operate in for inspiration).
1. Identify the moments that matter most to your organization, and determine which ones your brand has to win, as well as which ones are OK to lose.
2. Try to better understand the target audience and their needs; also, see how those needs relate to your company’s products and services.
3. Know the keywords and phrases that customers use when searching at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Sometimes little nuances make a big difference.
4. Use site analytics to better understand usage. This can help you troubleshoot problems, such as where customers drop off when filling out online forms or how to better optimize the online experience.
5. Find out what your current desktop and mobile site speeds are and then benchmark them—not only against others in the industry, but also against all online leaders.
6. Start small. By focusing on what makes the most sense for your organization.
Back in 2008, AT&T asked consumers to “reach out and touch someone.” Well, what goes around comes around. But in this case, it’s your brand that needs to proactively reach out and be where your consumers are, wherever they are in their buyer journey to influence their buying decision.
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If you’re a health and wellness marketer and want to discuss how to improve your prospective customer’s digital path to purchase experience, reach out to Art Stiefel, Trajectory’s Director of Digital Strategy.