We already live and breathe for those mobile moments
‘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’
When we want something, we are increasingly reaching for our mobile phones.
Want to know what to cook with the ingredients you’ve got? Grab your phone and do a quick search.
Need to know how to fix the brakes on your bike? Watch a how-to video, we’ve all been there and we’ve all been at the mercy of our irreplaceable friend, our mobile phone.
Which kettle should you buy? You’re standing in your local electrical store and to decide between two makes you get your phone out and watch an unboxing video and see someone boil a kettle and pour some water for tea…
It’s these micro-moments that brands are fighting over.
Google research shows 67% of consumers are more likely to convert on a mobile optimised site and 57% of consumers say they are less likely to engage with a company if their site is not mobile optimised and you risk losing customers as 61% of consumers say they will move to another site if they cannot find what they want on mobile quickly.
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The millennial generation is consumed by video
Google and Ipsos researched 1,519 millennials who owned a smartphone, asking each of them to keep a diary of their online and offline video interaction for a day.
The findings showed that 18-34-year-olds are twice as likely to focus on a video being played on mobile as opposed to a television or desktop computer and those who see ads or branded content on their smartphones are nearly twice as likely to share the branded content. Mobile viewers are also more likely than TV viewers to talk about the video they’ve been watching. This goes further as Google suggests that smartphone video viewers are nearly twice as likely as TV viewers to “feel a sense of personal connection to brands that show video content or ads on their devices.”
Holding a phone in your hand and watching a video is a more personal experience than looking at a TV or desktop and therefore the mobile video is where brands need to be to building personal connections with their users.
Watching video on smartphones is less distracting and is often a sole activity, whereas only 28% of television watching is done without interruption. Distracting activities include eating, chatting, cooking, and using a computer, all of which are harder to do when watching a video on a smartphone; 53% of which was uninterrupted.
And the home is no longer the place where marketers grab the attention of consumers as 34% of mobile video viewing is done away from home – at work or when out shopping – and more often than not people will be more meaningfully engaged in video content as they are looking for specific info.
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The growth of video advertising on mobile
Three out of four mobile users also said that having the choice to skip an advert is important and brands can benefit from being sensitive to a user’s personal experiences on their smartphones. A study by Rosetta Stone (a go-to resource for interactive language learning) who ran TrueView (video adverts where the brand pays each time someone chooses to watch them) ads to test different video thumbnails to see which one caught the attention of the mobile users and then promoting further the preferred version of its ad with YouTube Masthead (a video ad unit added to the YouTube homepage that auto-plays). This double mobile technique returned a 51% increase in YouTube channel subscribers and a ten-times increase in mobile traffic to the brand site.
It has been reported that more than half of smartphone video viewers use video to help them decide on a product and YouTube was their preferred go-to-site to get information about a brand or product. A Google mobile in-store study highlighted how these videos are beginning to replace the role of the shop assistant as one in three shoppers prefer to use a smartphone to find out extra information on a product rather than ask an employee for help.
Google upped the ante for the importance of mobile optimised websites back in April 2015 when they changed the algorithm giving preference to mobile optimised pages in mobile search results. There have been further updates including May 2016 when Google announced there was a boost to the mobile-friendly algorithm.
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Facebook video a hit without the sound
Facebook has also seen a large growth in video use. In April 2015 Facebook reached 4 billion video views, which means four times as many videos were watched over the last year, and 75% of these were viewed on mobile by 25-44-year-olds.
It has been said however that 85% of video is watched without sound according to a number of publishers. This is a key reason for so many videos also having subtitles so that users can consume the information without the need for sound. As Facebook feeds are inundated with videos it has become the norm to watch many of these during work/school hours so keeping the sound off is often the most practical way.
The ‘How To’ trend
A typical video is the ‘unboxing’ video where a user unboxes a purchased item and talks about their immediate experience, which helps the consumer who is deciding on a product to quickly predict the experience of ownership.
Over a hundred million hours of how-to videos have been watched on YouTube in North America in 2015, most of which was done by millennials on mobiles. Additionally, 30% of 18-34-year-olds buy something after watching a how-to video, at the same time YouTube reaches 18-24yr olds more than any other cable network in the U.S every month.
With YouTube having over a billion users which is almost a third of all internet users globally and generating billions of views, it stands to reason that this is a platform with both ample opportunities for advertising and brand exposure.
During an ‘I-want-to-do’ micro-moment, 91% of smartphone users will reach for their devices for inspiration to complete a task. The most popular topics of I-want-to-dos are home improvement, cooking, and beauty.
To win users in these moments, brands are racing to create a range of how-to content for their products to drive sales.
Google has even set up a how-to-do a how-to for marketers, by focusing on what brands are doing to succeed:
• Identify moments of need across a consumer journey
• Focus on what people want to learn
• Discover when the how-to searches are being done to discover popular times of the day/week/year
• Use topic targeting to describe and label videos
• Measure user actions with Google Brand Lift
You can find out more about optimising your site for mobile and improving mobile SEO on Google’s developer pages.
There has never been a more important time to be optimising your website for mobile. As consumers reach for their phones to look for answers, if brands can meet their expectations with a relevant choice of videos, then they will be victors of the micro-moments.
