It’s all about delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. Today mobile offers us this capability to capture, analyse and execute in real-time on users immediate needs. Mobile is the disruptive force that is here to change long standing business models. When building a consumer strategy for your app, it is important to understand that the journey to business success begins with the consumers.
Influential factor of brand messages and services increases when the message caters to the consumer’s need, preferences, and context.
Engagement and incentives can make mobile moments more memorable.
Brand experience must be pleasant and relevant to your consumers’ experience. However, marketers need to look beyond demographic, location specific or personal preferences and execute more on better targeting options like hyper-context. Hyper-context applications delve deeper in contextual understanding, going a step ahead to combine context with users past behaviours and preferences and to even predict the users’ need in the next moment. A personalized mobile experience that enriches consumer experience can augment favourable attitude toward a brand message, increasing purchase intention and significantly add to a company’s bottom line.
Consumer strategies on mobile must focus on improving engagement with consumers in their mobile moment – defined by Forrester as:
A mobile moment is a point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants immediately, in context.
The faster companies and marketers adapt to giving contextual experiences to their users the faster they would be able to keep pace with their competitors who are already engaging with their mobile consumers.
Starbucks of US has emerged as a clear leader in catering to consumers in their mobile moments of need. Building a strong loyalty program (My Starbucks Rewards), when members pay via smartphone, they get to redeem their awards for free drinks and food. Talking revenue, the rewards for the company has been huge: “The Starbucks app is on track to process over $1.5 billion in payment volume in the U.S. in 2014.”(Via Business Insider)
Adding on to their brand experience, Starbucks recently announced that they are ‘working on an order-ahead mobile application this year in a bid to speed up service and boost sales.’ The app will allow users to place their order before they arrive, reducing their wait time thereby adding to a more positive experience at their stores. Starbucks, through its successful consumer strategy has established a strong message on how influential factor of brand messages and services increases when the service caters to the consumer’s need, preferences, and context.
With a truly mobile-first Indian market, there is an unprecedented opportunity for marketers and brands to reach out to mobile users and capitalize through new innovative platforms that leverage on the mobile moments of consumers. According to Gartner the Indian eCommerce market will reach $6 billion in 2015 a 70 percent increase over 2014 revenue of $3.5 billion. The report cites the biggest challenge is in ‘getting the business digital commerce strategy right and adequate investments in people, process and technology to engage with customers across channels, which has been ignored by Indian enterprises so far.’
Brands and marketers must focus on creating a strong consumer strategy to increase customer connection and customer delight to overcome this challenge. Engagement and incentives can make mobile moments more memorable and add to measurable revenue growth and improved customer loyalty.
Insights for creating a better mobile experience
The App Publishers need to understand their consumers’ intent and patterns. Once the app publishers identify these patterns and intents and analyse the need and behaviour, it will further help to pre-target user with relevant services, information and content. For example in iOS 8, users can take quick actions in response to a push notification like – accepting an invitation to a party, one-click offers on sensor enabled shoes which indicate a wear outAnother big step in this direction is Google’s step towards indexing mobile app intents/pages. This aids fastest hop discoveries of apps and services from one app to another. With such innovations, it gives marketers a hyper-moment of opportunity to make itself relevant and visible to users when they are in a moment of need.
Another scenario is about enabling a user looking for second hand cars via search, online discussions with friends etc discover great deals catering to his needs and specific to his location while conversing. It is a hyper-moment where the users’ needs have been seamlessly met by just a click, and on the go. Mobile apps have opened up brilliant opportunities to connect consumers and brands in the mobile moment.
Conclusion
Creating such mobile moment, a user can be given the fastest service to solve his need at that instance and helping simplify the process of buy and sell. Apps which are able to weave this intelligence into their offerings will succeed in connecting to consumers in enriching and positive ways. This will not only delight the consumer but will also benefit brands.
Contributed to Ms. Prima Dona – VP Product Innovation, IP, Business Strategy at KeyPoint Technologies
