How to Capture 30 Billion Daily Mobile Moments, with Forrester’s Julie Ask

What is a “mobile moment,” and why should brands and marketers care? I discussed this recently with Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Julie Ask.

Ask popularized the concept over the past year, and she’s referring to those unique points in time and space when consumers are looking for something specific that they need — a product, an idea, a piece of information — and brands have an opportunity to answer that question, fulfill that need, or stimulate a deeper interaction.

Every day in the U.S. alone there are something like 30 billion mobile moments, Ask says. To better understand these moments and how marketers can capitalize on them, I caught up with her recently at Mobile Summit, near Sausalito, California. Here’s what Ask had to say:

Forrester on Mobile Moments

Marketing’s holy grail is the right offer at the right time to the right person — perfect relevance, perfect timing, and perfect targeting — and mobile moments are an opportunity to approach that pinnacle. It starts by owning as much interaction with your customer as possible via your app, website, or other media.

The problem with that, of course, is that much of your customers’ experience of your brand, your product, and your service is mediated by platforms such as Google or Facebook. In that case, you have to “borrow” mobile moments: earning the right to intersect with your customers’ lives in their moment of need or desire by having a well-established presence on social or via search.

(Which is getting harder and harder without paying for the privilege… just another reason to double down on your owned avenues to customers.)

Individual people have about 150 to 200 mobile moments a day, Ask says, citing research by legendary analyst and venture capitalist Marie Meeker. That’s a point in time when you pick up your smartphone and initiate a search, browse for something to kill a few minutes, pull up a map, or play a game.

Earning access to them is hard work, but increasingly valuable, Ask says.

See All Mobile Minutes

In our first TUNE Mobile Minute, we looked at mobile ad blocking, which is spiking massively. In our second, we talked about why that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. In our third, we explored how much deeper customer engagement is via mobile.

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