How Micromoments Bring Major Results

What if you could develop an unmissable ad—one so compelling that it immediately grabbed attention and made its point before viewers had a chance to look away? It might sound like the stuff of dreams, but it’s not a far-fetched idea. When L’Oréal sought to raise awareness of their Unbelieva-Brow product launch on social media, they needed an approach that would raise eyebrows before anyone could blink. The result? Ultra-short, super-fast video that makes an immediate value add before you can scroll past.

The challenge of standing out in competitive, fast-moving social media channels highlights the importance of micromoments: the quick moments in which users turn to a device to do or figure something out. These unassuming moments can be powerful for driving results, employing channel strategy to reach users in the perfect place and time.

With L’Oréal, for example, we drew upon our close relationship with Facebook to highlight what seemed like a bad user behavior—rapid scrolling and low engagement times with posts—into an opportunity: 1.7-second video designed to instantly captivate audiences and achieve a higher quality of engagement. “What were once missed opportunities have become brands’ most desirable, unmissable content,” says MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. “By applying platform insights to consumer data, MediaMonks partners with brands to leverage digital-first content and drive more conversions–better, faster and cheaper than ever before.”

Identifying Your Audience’s Biggest Micromoments

Micromoments might seem innocuous enough: the time spent waiting for your bus, checking your phone in bed or a quick glance on your way to the coffee shop. But these moments add up, rivaling time spent watching TV: According to Nielsen’s Q1 2018 Total Audience Report, the average US adult devotes about 4:41 hours to digital media each day, almost the amount of time devoted to live or time-shifted TV consumption.

Employing social listening of L’Oréal’s audience, we highlighted several moments throughout the day in which users engage with the platforms supported by the campaign: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Because the campaign’s content followed influencers through a “day in the life” format, establishing a timeline of where, when and how users accessed social media enabled us to optimize the story beats for the platform at that time of day. For example, realizing that users check Facebook on mobile early in the morning, we could optimize morning content for the platform—like a video demonstrating how the Unbelieva-Brow makeup can survive a sweaty morning workout routine.

Support Moments Through Channel Strategy

Our unmissable ad format grew out of a key channel strategy insight about the unique ways that users browse Facebook and Instagram: they scroll through content quickly. Social platforms may look very similar at first glance, but each digital touchpoint offers unique features. To stand out, brands must use these distinctive features to their disposal. While brands might struggle to identify the nuances of communication from one platform to another, a creative and production partner like MediaMonks can provide the insights necessary through research and existing platform partnerships. “Facebook is such a fast-paced platform that we have to ensure to catch the attention of the user as fast as possible,” says Andre Rood, Global Advertising Director at MediaMonks. “Applying this research to your advertising is a recipe for success.”

Influencers are trendy–but are they worth a risk?

On Instagram, meanwhile, we used native platform features to drive engagement. This included highlighting and encouraging UGC through story reposts, creating polls within stories and countdowns to new content. Interactive content like this not only engages users, but also provides brands with contextual metrics through which they can better understand the way users consume or interact with a given touchpoint. This can include time spent viewing content, customer pathways and more. For campaigns to be effective, brands must be able to unlock value from insights specific to their audience or platform.

Identify Opportunities for Relevancy

Meeting users at the right time and place as outlined above is important, but you’re missing out if you don’t ensure the message is relevant to audiences to begin with. Early in developing the campaign, we highlighted key audience: that the target skewed younger and liked to stay on-trend, and that durability was a key need from consumers. These insights informed the tone of the campaign and the makeup features to highlight.

But that’s not all: what good is a social campaign that isn’t social? Highlighting different audience segments—the sporty type, the nightlife lover, travel enthusiast and girl on the go—we pulled together influencers from L’Oréal’s pre-existing partner roster whose content embodied each. This ensured content had relevance to diverse interests and values, highlighting all the different scenarios in which the durability of the makeup might be tested.

Continual Optimization is Key for Long-Term Success

What sets digital content apart from traditional is real-time performance metrics that provide detailed results on what works and what doesn’t. Campaigns must employ continuous optimization. Forrester defines continuous optimization as “a data-, analytics-, and insights-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer in order to adapt and optimize customer experiences.” This approach allows for fine-tuning of deliverables throughout a campaign’s lifespan—and insights gleaned can translate to the next campaign’s design as well, allowing for more relevant customer experiences.

With CMOs seeking accountability in partners, the demand for results is becoming more pronounced. “As an industry, there has been so much focus on making everything quicker and cheaper,” MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar said in an interview with Adobe’s 99U. “More and more it is about the effectiveness of the work.” Through designing and iterating on digital-first content, organizations provide themselves the opportunity to collect and iterate upon actionable data, building brand equity through relevancy and a closer connection to audiences.