We live in a fast-paced age of convenience and instant information. As citizens of the world and as consumers, everything we’d ever want to know is quite literally at our fingertips. Certainly for brands and marketers then, mobile devices have fundamentally changed the way they seek to earn consumer attention.

We all know from experience how simple and swift it is to look something up on a smartphone. Google reports that 91 percent of mobile users will look for information on their phones while in the middle of a task to find insight or inspiration. We quickly take stock of what we need, make a decision, then move on, practically in the blink of an eye. This is a challenge for marketers, who may end up missing their chance to catch someone’s attention.

Google calls these scenarios “micro-moments,” and defines the term as “an intent-rich moment when a person turns on a device to act on a need — to know, go, do, or buy.” The company splits micro-moments into four distinct categories that provide windows of opportunity for marketers to grab: I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. Each represents a different stage in the researching/purchasing process that a consumer goes through, and it’s up to the brands and marketers to answer the call of duty provided by the everyday people in their constant searches. But how exactly do brands and marketers take advantage of these micro-moments?

Because of the speed at which micro-moments occur, the best course of action is for a brand to try and anticipate where and when micro-moments will occur, and to provide information and guidance at those points of entry. Collecting data that gives insight into existing customers will allow companies to see what exactly is drawing people to your brand’s website. Tools like Google Analytics can even reveal the specific searches that have already led people to a brand. This information will show you where and how of one’s strategy, in order to attract the attention of a consumer in a split-second.

From there, providing the appropriate information and creating content that directly addresses these consumers can bring them straight to a particular brand. Of course, the crux of this stage is that marketers must not only address what the consumer is looking for, but why they are looking for it. The collected customer data will reveal the reasons they came looking for a particular product or service in the first place. 

Therefore, the content a brand creates should focus on the ways their products and services provide solutions to the problems that consumers are regularly having. In this way, marketers can establish their brands as a trustworthy and knowledgeable adviser of sorts, giving consumers advice on how to fix their problems and how their offerings can meaningfully do so. Once they’re in the door, so to speak, brands must quickly prove your worth, otherwise customers will move on.

This experience of providing content and information to hook a consumer means optimizing it and streamlining it for the fast-paced process that are micro-moments. For instance, a block of text that is dense with information won’t appeal to a consumer in the midst of a micro-moment, and they’ll simply move on to the next brand. But providing easily digestible information in the form of videos, infographics, and the like, customers will clearly see what makes a product unique and appealing. Other marketing practices, such as SEO optimization, will serve to make a brand even more visible and accessible to a constantly searching public.

When it comes down to it, the marketing tactics remain similar to practices that have been established in recent years, but with micro-moments, the window of attention that brands can take advantage of is so small that you could blink and you’ll miss it. It’s amazing to think that so much effort and analysis goes into such a fleeting moment, but such is the nature of our lives. As technology continues to advance, brands and marketers will need to continue relying on utilizing these micro-moments to help provide their products and services to a fast-paced world.