Designing for the moment
Taking advantage of special moments that resonate with your audience is a great way to engage on mobile. Let’s look at the ways we can use design planning to make mobile content creation timely and efficient without compromising user experience.
The star wide-receiver on an NFL team just ran an incredible 104 yard touchdown to bring their team back to take the lead. Fans are going wild, celebrating in-stadium and posting on social media from home. You’re a mobile marketer for the team, and want to engage your fans at this exciting time, but need to act fast.
Simply sending out a message in a push notification or tweet is par for the course these days. To stand out from the crowd, you’ll want to deliver content that is richer and more meaningful than a few lines of text. Fortunately, marketers and digital content producers have platforms like MailChimp or Rover that allow for the quick assembly of well designed campaigns and content.
Let’s look at a game moment in sports for an example. Our goal is to avoid simply shoehorning marketing material into the situation where it will feel self-serving or irrelevant, so ask these questions as you go forward:
- Does this experience or content provide value my user?
- Is my content and timing contextually relevant?
- Does this experience feel human and trustworthy?
- Does the call to action feel like a natural next step?
With these in mind, let’s consider an example where wide receiver Cordarelle Patterson of the Vikings just ran an incredible 104yd touchdown against the Cardinals. To celebrate this exciting moment, you (as the marketer) want to offer a special 50% off special on Patterson jerseys. You might think OK, let’s send out a push notification to my app users, with a link to the online store.
This is functional, but could be improved with a different approach. Let’s use our best practices from above to evaluate it:
Does it provide value to my user? If the user had no interest in buying a Jersey, this notification wasn’t very useful. Especially if I wasn’t watching the game, I won’t have much context.
Does this experience feel human and trustworthy? Not especially. While the copy is somewhat personalized, embedding the offer right in the push notification feels like all you care about is selling merchandise.
Let’s see how this feels when we add a step in-between to provide more value, context and trustworthiness.
This feels better. Let’s examine why by checking against our best practices:
Does it provide value to my user? Yes. With video being one of the most popular features in sports apps, most fans will appreciate being able to watch the replay and relive the moment.
Is my content and timing contextually relevant? Yes. Not only am I taking advantage of sending this soon after it happened, the video provides context to those who weren’t able to see the original play live.
Does this experience feel human and trustworthy? Unlike the first example which felt overly sales-y, the intent feels more genuine and less marketing/merchandising oriented.
Does the call to action feel like a natural next step? There are two calls to in action in this case. Watching the video is the obvious first step. The secondary action promoting Patterson’s jersey makes sense after seeing the incredible play.
How to execute
There are certainly execution challenges to consider when taking a more content-rich approach for time-sensitive marketing. However, with some strategy and design planning, most of these hurdles can be avoided.
Optimize your process
While collaboration between different team members is key in getting things out the door quickly, sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can bog things down. Make sure your marketing team knows who is responsible for what, and keep layers of approval to a minimum. Skip email chains and opt for group messaging solutions like Slack to reduce communication clutter and confusion.
Plan ahead
While it’s impossible to anticipate spur-of-the-moment opportunities, try and categorize the types of moments you would like to capitalize on. Consider what it would take to get your content assembled and delivered for each opportunity.
Design Templates
It’s key to set up templates in whichever marketing CMS you are using. Make sure your layouts can accommodate different types of imagery, and try standardize your copy to headlines, subheads, and paragraphs. In the video example above, I repurpose the Cordarelle Patterson template using Rover for another exciting game moment in 1 minute, simply by changing some copy and text.
In Summary
Whether it’s an exciting sports play, or a new product announcement that will be available for pre-order tomorrow, marketers in all categories should be ready to capitalize on such moments to stay relevant with their audience. However taking action is only half the challenge — bringing your users meaningful and relevant content about these events on a consistent and timely basis is what will really make your campaigns stand out from the crowd.
