What is "Moment Marketing" and How Is It Helping Brands Stay Relevant?

‘Of online consumers, 69% agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company's message influences their perception of a brand.’ - The Wall Street Journal

Moment marketing allows for your brand and business to take advantage of current and ongoing events to create connections & marketing collaterals while these events are happening. This is used by brands and businesses to position and place themselves in the ongoing conversations bringing relevance to how they market. 

Digital marketers are constantly trying to find interesting ways and mediums to connect with their customers. They are turning to moment marketing to get their message across with more relevance.

Plenty of digital marketers struggle to move quick enough to spread well-timed and appropriate messages on multiple channels, while others struggle with the new and creative back and forth needed to go to market with a relevant and on-brand campaign. Those who are able to do both can be sure that they will ride the wave of consumer attention. 

Instead of long-term returns, digital marketers are looking for quick solutions and instant returns on lesser budgets. A lot of brands are turning to moment marketing to keep up with the current conversations. Many brands have been latching onto the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the now global interest in the Black Lives Matters human rights campaign. 

Major global brands such as Google, Nike, Twitter, Netflix, and Reebok have all jumped at this as an opportunity to not only spread the message and support the cause(s) around this heated topic, but are also using this as a huge platform to trend and get their own brand message across many channels. Therefore these brands are using moment marketing to its fullest advantage by constructing creatives around them. 

‘These are campaigns that brands create by hijacking a trending topic and weaving clever content around it. Brands aim to catch people’s attention by becoming part of a conversation around a trend.’ - Deloitte

Below are a few moment marketing tips which can be beneficial to you and your business:

• Adopting the moment and publishing creatives that cleverly position you on whatever is happening in the world at a given time. This gives your brand an edge and allows it to stand out and be memorable.  
  

• Becoming a part of people’s trend/newsfeed organically ensures that your marketing message reaches them when they are most receptive, and willing to listen, engage or interact. 
  

• Keep sales at the centre of your campaigns and make sure your communications follow back into your product or service offerings so you can entice customer sales.
  

• Make good use of existing memes or make your own because, according to Google Trends, ‘memes’ are becoming a more popular search term than “Kim Kardashian”. Meme marketing is a great way to reach millennials who spend a daily average of 211 minutes online. Millennials really dislike traditional advertising so using memes to make people smile or LOL with a light reference to your brand is a cool way of getting your potential customer’s attention without getting obnoxious and too promotional.
  

• Engage in wordplay and banter because the brands already doing this are having real success. Engage in some well disposed banter, have quick comebacks and engage in Twitter wars. These tactics keep audiences hooked and wanting more.
  

• Stay true and honest to your core brand message, the last thing you want is to lose credibility. Do not risk ruining your brand message or compromising on the values you and your business stand for and believe in just to be on trend with a certain event.

Take a look below at some massive campaigns run by some of the world’s most recognized brands, see how they used moment marketing to push their brand:

Burger King slayed during the height of the corona pandemic with this social distancing ad:

‍

Oreo bankrolled a 30 min long power outage during the 2013 Super Bowl with a tweet that retweeted over 18,000 times, quickly becoming a viral talking point amongst audiences worldwide:

‍

‍

Moment marketing is more than a trend, it is a marketing sensation that is here to stay. Moment marketing can help digital marketers reach out to a huge number of customers at a low cost. This helps form a deeper connection with audiences over the long term.

Brands that really care for their customers and put those customers first will win in the end. The world is still dealing with the corona pandemic, and now more recently racial tensions and protests. Many brands have come forward and put out responsible messages. This is a great way to acquire customer loyalty and trust that will outlast even the hardest times.