What Is ZMOT To A Nigerian?

ZMOT is a four letter acronym for a marketing concept developed at Google by Jim Lecinski. It stands for the Zero Moment Of Truth. 

In digital marketing, a ZMOT is the most crucial stage in a shopper's decision making life cycle, and it presents tremendous opportunities for marketers who are serious about taking the lead in their industries in this new digital age.

However, to the average Nigerian business person, this may not mean much right now. But I am willing to bet that it would mean a great deal to many of you in the next 3 to 5 years. Especially if the country continues to grow and develop at this rate.

DEFINITION

In a marketer's hypothesis of a customer's path to a purchase, the ZMOT is the stage that comes immediately after the potential shopper receives a stimulus (advertisement, or other form of initial proposition) and before a decision is made at the store.  

Before the dawn of the digital age, stimulus was believed to play a decent role in the customer's mind to get him to a store. Advertisements are expected to grab your attention and sell you an idea. This is called the stimulus stage, and it usually comes long before a decision is taken at the store shelf.  

This decision stage is called the First Moment Of Truth (or FMOT). A stage where wise marketers who realize they cannot rely completely on the message in the initial stimulus to get you to make the purchase.  So by doing some additional promotion in this Shelf stage (the packaging of the product, in-store advertising, etc) marketers want to influence your decision at the point of purchase (like a store).
If this is done right, marketers could even "steal" the customer that was brought in by a competitor's stimulus. 

After check out at the counter the customer takes the product or service (after a deal or contract has been made), and uses it. This is the Experience Stage and the amount of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) that the customer gets with the product is aptly called the Second Moment Of Truth.

BEFORE

AFTER

Meanwhile, the Zero Moment Of Truth comes after the Stimulus stage, but before the First Moment Of Truth. It became a recognizable phenomenon as the world got more and more transformed by the internet and mobile phones. 
And there is more than enough evidence to show that it is playing an increasing role on how modern day shoppers make their final decision at the counter. The most crucial role in many cases.

Consider someone who enters a shop to ask for Product XYZ, with serial number 123, with accessories ABC. 
Such a case is that of someone who did his homework well before going to the store, right? That is how to understand the ZMOT.

To make it simple:
The ZMOT phenomenon is a new way we behave;  like when you argue with a friend about who the top goal scorer in LaLiga is. A long time ago, such arguments often ended with guys making bets. 
These days, few young men are confident enough to take these bets, because they know that the other guy would get the answer within a second of bringing out their smartphone.

And many of us have extended this "swift answer mentality" to our shopping behavior as well. 

So the ZMOT is not only a concept, or a moment in time; it is a whole new mentality. A new and increasingly frequent destination we go to before we make a purchase.


In the new digital age, people no longer easily buy the B.S. of advertisements as they used to (pardon my expression). They want to investigate and learn more about the service or product. And this is simply because it is getting easier and easier for them to do so these days. Technology is changing the way the market behaves and you have no choice but to adjust to it. That is if you wish to remain in business for a long time.

HOW CAN ZMOT STRATEGY HELP MY BUSINESS?

Now I know some of you have heard about SEO (or Search Engine Optimization). While many more of you know a little bit about Online Advertising and how it is more target & intent oriented than the kind of advertising that you have in the real world.
Some of you might also be lucky to have learned a few things about Web Analytics, so you know that it is profitable for you to analyze how people interact with your website. And you all probably know more about Social Media Marketing and the fact that people are getting more and more advanced at using social networks (like Google+ and Facebook) as marketing and sales platforms.


But now, try to think of the ZMOT as an angle or an approach through which you pilot your business to greater success.  It's a method that often ties those other digital activities together in one powerful strategy. 

Imagine that you are managing a store in Ikeja that sells a particularly rare beauty product (XYZ).
Then imagine a woman who lives in Surulere and who wants that product XYZ really badly.
But now imagine that some creepy sales-rep from another beauty company is at her house trying to sell her an alternative product ABF.

So while she reluctantly thinks about buying this crappy product ABF, she thought to share on her Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles, a post asking her friends, "Does anyone know anywhere in Lagos where I can get rare cream XYZ?"

What kind of strategy would you adopt in engaging this kind of ready customer at the Zero Moment Of Truth?
You have to start thinking along those lines from now.
Not just launching digital campaigns for the sake of "needing to go digital with your marketing". 


Some more examples are:

• A cocoa farmer searching on Google for the most appropriate fertilizers. 

• An Abuja-based couple browsing for affordable hotels in Calabar for their honeymoon, and suddenly discovering that one of their friends has left a 5-star rating and an online review for an affordable guest house there.

• Or....Surprisingly making up your mind to buy an iPhone4 instead of the Blackberry Z10 you had previously planned to buy, after searching the term "Best Smartphone for business in Nigeria" and finding a very compelling blog article where someone was comparing a number of smartphones. 

In these examples, the suppliers or providers of fertilizer, or hotels and guest houses in Calabar, and of Androids and Blackberry phones can do something to give their own businesses the advantage. They don't have to rely on luck.

It requires a ZMOT strategy…Or it requires that you actually know how the digital realm works and how it shapes user behaviour.

So it is more about having a certain mentality than it is about being a super computer genius, wizard or guru. Or any of those other meaningless tags that people throw around these days. 

I would also say that it is more about adapting traditional marketing principles than it is about IT proficiency. I mean, you can always get computer geeks working for you, while you coordinate them. But not everyone really understands what Ogilvy meant when he said "To be interesting, be interested".

A ZMOT TESTIMONIAL

Here is something that I discovered while eavesdropping on a conversation between two ZMOT-minded professionals:
In answering a question about understanding where their customers were in their shopping life cycle, and what were the right messages to meet them at each point, Laurie Tucker (the Marketing Executive of Fedex) captured the essence of a ZMOT-minded strategy here; and I am slightly paraphrasing what she said:

"We've put up about 150 videos on our YouTube Channel to say, 'how do you use Fedex?'….But at another level we start to understand how our customers respond to our content, and we begin to grade them based on their engagement with us. We look for look-alikes; Test; Repeat; Repeat again; and then (we) begin to get sophisticated….So I start to think about this and realize that marketing is the new sales!"

Now, if you didn't get that, it is only because you are perhaps really new to digital marketing concepts in general. But please note that all I really need you to take away from what she said here is really just one word…

…THINK!

The marketer here (Laurie Tucker) gained a level of awareness by constantly engaging her customers at their ZMOTs. She is clearly rewired for the new digital age, and quite frankly the company she works for would reap the rewards of this.
ZMOT mindedness would do this for you as well.

As a Nigerian, you can surely testify to the increasing usage of mobile phones by all and sundry to browse the internet, and you know how often you hear people say, "google It!" nowadays.
This is our present reality. And the future will surely see it increase in this direction. If you are in business, you should be thinking of how to take advantage of this by now.

Thank you.


Did my article do anything for you?
Please let me know what you think?
Do you disagree or agree with anything? I look forward to hearing from you….

Find me on LinkedIn as well.

Zero Moment Of Truth Part 2 : The Enthusiast

In my prequel to this post, I did a few introductions and tried to give you some ideas as to how important it is for you to take the Zero Moment Of Truth seriously. In this article I am going to try to guide you into thinking with a ZMOT mindset, and in to realizing how that can greatly improve your marketing efforts. 

The idea behind this second part of my post is to try to start you on a journey of becoming a ZMOT enthusiast like myself. Because by first becoming enthusiastic about the ZMOT, you would indeed learn much quicker, what you need in order to gain the necessary advantage for your business, your brand  or your product in this new digital age. 

Now some of the actual experts of this topic like Jim Lecinsky, Todd Pollack and Brian Solis have released articles and books that actually explain this concept much more indepth. 
But the dimension that I bring as a very keen enthusiast, is such that anything I write, I try my possible best to make you (the African reader) understand what we are talking about, and how you could easily bring it into reality in our environment.

1. Mobile Is A Must

One day, I was asked a question by a hopeful blogger. He asked, "Even if people want to use the internet to read and learn, the NEPA (electricity) problems in Nigeria make it so difficult for most People. So how can I find people to even read my blog?"  

So I told him that there was a relatively easy way to fix that problem. But he quickly added, "and you know that most people cannot even afford laptops or iPads".
So I said that that was even what makes my solution more of an advantage for him, if he could implement it.

"So what is this magic solution of yours"?

And I told him to have a mobile optimization plan! 

I know that may sound too simplistic, but then just try to wrap your head around the scenario that the vast majority of websites in Nigeria (I cannot say much about the rest of Africa yet) don't account for mobile users. 

And yet, from a marketer's perspective, you wonder why mobile internet is not more or less compulsory in Nigeria. 

No wonder Facebook usage in Nigeria is so phenomenal?
Because Facebook is one of only a few websites known by Nigerians to have a version that is comfortably responsive to mobile phones of different screen sizes. This point cannot be over-emphasized.

Meanwhile, the reasons why Americans and Europeans use smartphones to surf the web may be indeed very different from the reasons why Nigerians do. Nevertheless, what is certain is that smartphones have become key players in this whole global online struggle for our attention. 

Therefore if you are doing business and you wish to attract large amounts of people (whether American or Nigerian; whether for your corporate branding, or for lead generation, or for online retail) your website has to be able to communicate clearly through a mobile phone interface. Not to mention the added advantage you get as a mobile phone user can instantly make a call to your business, or at least store your phone number, when he sees your contact page on your site.

2. Social Media Re-visitation

Ever since people realized that social media networks were useful for marketing, we have been seeing people just going about dropping links and promoting stuff everywhere like crazy. 

Some of us have clearly forgotten the "social" in this whole social media thing. So we spend so much unnecessary energy dropping links all over the social sites, presuming that others are using the internet for the purpose of searching for promotional links to click on. 

ZMOT mindedness makes you a lot more creative and much more effective with your social media marketing campaigns. It opens your eyes to see what many other digital marketers don't see. It will help you remember or realize that you yourself don't go around looking for links to click on.

There is always an important trigger that gets you to click on a link. 

Zero Moment reasoning also protects you from coming into that irrational mindset of those marketers who would do anything to see their website rank on the Top of Google Search result pages; As if ranking on the Top of search automatically means that people would throw their hard earned money at your website.

A ZMOT minded marketer understands that there are more than one way to catch a fish. 
For example, I can show you a nifty way of using a combination of Facebook, Google+ and Youtube to do a lot of damage, even if you don't have a website. I talk more about using video for ZMOT warfare in this article here.
But if I started to explain those things here now, this article could become a book. I am always reachable at the Digital Africa Community. There I can take questions about ZMOT, FMOT and other areas of digital marketing.

Now there are many other techniques to ZMOT readiness like using AdWords PPC campaigns and one magical thing they call Remarketing, or taking advantage of Affiliate bloggers, and my own personal addition, the use of digital print and direct mail solutions. But for the sake of your time reading this article, the 3rd and last tactic I will mention here is learning how to stalk users at the review sites.   

3. Raptness To Reviews

Again, I'm not sure I know how people behave in Ghana or South Africa, but here in Nigeria, I know that word of mouth is an extremely powerful form of product promotion. So if you can put words into Mr A's mouth, that could easily lead to Mr B buying your product.

I mean, I have literally seen people come to a store specifically to purchase an iPhone, and right there in an instant, they ask some other customer for his advice, and he suddenly turns into a smartphone expert; And before you know it, the lady who came to buy an iPhone4 is going home with her brand new Blackberry Z10.

In fact, more or less, everyone in this country is a consulting physician (both medical and trado-medical).
You feel slight dizziness and a throbbing headache? Your next door neighbor, the bank manager, prescribes an anti-biotic for you. Just like that!

So whether you realize it or not, most of your potential clients or customers are easily susceptible to influence from others. At some point in their journey, they could easily have been your customer. But along the way, someone prescribed an alternative for them.
And this behavior is happening on the internet as well, so it is not wise to ignore it. You must learn how to benefit from it. 

You might not be able to prevent or rescue every one of your potential customers from those self-appointed experts, but there are ways that you can work on wrestling some of them back to your own offering. And of course, you can generate your own "experts".

In this other scenario, try to imagine you didn't log out of your Yahoomail, before you visited the Trip Advisor website to check out affordables hotels in Abuja. Incidentally, your Facebook account is associated to your Yahoomail.

Now you are gazing at the hotel at the top of the page that costs only N5000 per night; it looks like a good option for you. Then suddenly you notice that some people you know have already spent time at some other hotel below, and they gave it very good reviews. It costs only N400 more than the one you first noticed. And these people you know are people you really respect.

This could happen because Trip Advisor is using your Facebook friends list, and it doesn't even occur to you what's going on, or why they are showing you what your friends have reviewed.

This is a real ZMOT phenomenon. It happens everyday, and nobody really cares to ask why.
But what you should be asking is, how do I capitalize on it?
That should be he question every merchant is asking in this era....how do I win the zero moment of truth?

And the more you think and strategize in this mind frame, the more likely you would come up with answers for your digital business goals. The technology is available to help you win some of the battles, you just have to discover what they are, how they work, and how to use them. 
The more you actively take part in ZMOT warfare, the more you'll learn; and the more new tools you would discover. This is my advice to you if you have a small business. 

However, if yours is a large company that can afford it, it is best you hire a ZMOT Coordinator who is, at least, handy with his AdWords and Google Analytics, and has a ZMOT mindset. 

ZMOT ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH Infographic-Shoppers' Path to Purchase via Cool Daily Infographics

Now, someone might ask, "hey why do I need a consultant who claims to be ZMOT-savvy?", "Can't I just give this article you've written here to my already existing traditional marketing department to handle"? 

Well, you could try that....But you should be careful about how they run with it. Afterall, those guys are coming from a mindset that is quite different from ours. A mindset where so many boundaries and limitations exist. 

So someone else could say, "Or I could even read through this article several times over, add some extra research, and do it all by myself?"

Well, actually you could. And in fact I am hoping you would. 
I am hoping that all those who pay attention to my articles would become ZMOT-minded marketers, and do their own marketing by themselves one day. This would open up huge opportunities for me with the larger businesses, who are always the slowest to adopt these kinds of ideas. 
However, their current paradigm is such that they always seem to want to minimize risk and pay more attention to financial budgeting, rather than statistical and analytics data.

So they are not likely to take a chance on investing on a ZMOT-manager or an inhouse digital marketing team until they see the result of my ZMOT strategies through those who have used it and profited from it, at lower levels. 

Yet, this leaves you, the small or mid-sized business owner, with the opportunity to become enthusiastic enough about the ZMOT to learn how to get a head-start and an advantage for your self, and hopefully taking some of their market share while they are still asleep.



Thanks for reading.
Feel free to drop a comment or question below. I'm always here to assist. Also consider reading my post defining ZMOT in Nigeria, using Nigerian examples.

Zero Moment Of Truth - Part1

The ZMOT is not such a complex thing to be honest. 
In fact it could be incredibly easy to understand, especially if you already know a lot about how the internet works, coupled with some reasonable knowledge about the business process of marketing (which usually involves advertising, publicity and sales distribution). You need a combination of these two, if you want to really enjoy this article. 

So consider the zero moment of truth as that point in a customer's journey where she/he bounces back and forth looking for answers about a product or service she/he may be interested in. She/He uses Search, Reviews, Ratings, Specifications Data, and even user comments as a guide to come to her decision. So clearly, you can see why you need to play a part in at least adding something to the conversation that leads to this decision.

WHERE TO SLOT ZMOT 

There already existed a tested and trusted marketing model that was conceptualized by Procter & Gamble and has to a very high degree, revealed the strategic points in a customer's journey where it is best to try to capture his attention.

STIMULUS – When the customer sees an advert of any product or service that may interest him (let's say a pair shoes) and does get interested; or he saw the ad and suddenly remembers that he had already planned to buy a pair of shoes at some point.

SHELF – First Moment Of Truth – The customer has finally taken the decision to go to the store to get those shoes. There are some customers who go out with a plan not to return home without a pair of new shoes, no matter what. There are also some customers who never really have an idea of what they really want to get, so they rely on cues from shop attendants or other shoppers. Traditional marketers realize that the packaging and labeling of the product can go a long way in winning the First moment of truth. They also know that by having their shoes advertised boldly all over the shoe section of the store,or maybe even having sales agents in the larger stores, could help to nudge undecided customers.

EXPERIENCE – The Second Moment Of Truth – this comes after the customer has purchased his shoes and has started wearing them. Chances are that the customer will report his experience with the shoes (and possibly with the store where he bought them from) to the next person. 

This is why good marketing actually begins at the point where you ensure the quality of the design of your product. It is important for your marketing that customers don’t go about saying bad things about your product or about your store. 

Or rather, if you’re just the dealer and not the manufacturer of the shoes, then hopefully your sales-reps and floorwalkers are respectful and patient with customers. 
Because that is the experience they take away from your business. 

But most customers would definitely say something, whether it is good or bad. Whether it is about the shoes or about your store. 

The idea at the Experience Stage (Second Moment Of Truth) is to get them to say more of the good stuff. Especially about your store, if you’re the store owner.

Zero Moment Of Truth 
To be honest, going by today’s turbo-charged rate of information & technological advancement, we could almost say that ZMOT (since 2011) is already an old marketing concept. I have already given an intro on it for an African audience in one of my previous articles about ZMOT in Africa. But a good way to summarize it here would be to just say that ZMOT is that virtual valley of decision that your customers go to after getting inspired by an advert that catches their attention, and before going to a shop to spend their hard earned money on the product that is promoted by that advert. 

So despite the way I listed these terms to make the introduction, ZMOT actually slots in between Stimulus and Shelf. So now, I'll try to explain how it works...

DIGITAL MARKETING, ZMOT TARGETING

A ZMOT Ready Marketer first of all has to be a Digital Marketer. He then has to be the kind of DM who has his eye on almost every area of digital marketing, as well has having a decent understanding of typical offline advertising as well. But in addition to those, he has to be aware of the importance of the ZMOT, know how to identify the ZMOT moments in his industry, and he must be able to respond swiftly to take advantage of them.  

By now, the reason should be quite simple, if not then allow me to illustrate with this example:

Imagine you’re on an island where 10,000 people plan to buy shoes within the next month. Now imagine if there were 10 shoe retailers on that island. Then assume that all these shoe retailers have basically the same quality of shoes and they all sold at the same exact price.

Now, all things being equal, and if they all did some local advertising in the same magazines and on the same tv stations on the island; then there actually isn't much reason to doubt that their total units sold could be almost identical as well. 

Maybe some would sell 1100 shoes that month, and others who were unlucky might do 900. Just humour me for now....

Enter digital marketing.
Imagine if 2 of those retailers decided to step up to owning websites; and they took on some online advertising campaigns (especially Enhanced Campaigns from Google). Imagine they did some pretty effective SEO, and some social media marketing. 

The dynamics would have changed because you would now have some shoe retailers encroaching on customers of retailers that are geographically far away from their territory. 

They have the shoes on display on the website so the customer from 20 miles away can gaze at the shoes from different angles and in different colors. 

These smart retailers could also offer free delivery to further convince the customer to shop with them instead of the retailer close by. 
At this stage it may not matter even if the near-by retailer has the same shoes the customer has seen on the web. What matters is the information, and the knowledge of where & how to get it. 

So thanks to their digital marketing campaigns, the 2 retailers with e-commerce websites could very well draw as many as 2800 and 2400 customers respectively, while the remaining 8 retailers may have to struggle with an average of 600 sales each for that month. Or it could even be worse for those remaining 8 guys.
It all depends on if one, or both of the ecommerce-smart retailers are willing to go the extra ZMOT mile. 

So let us just assume that one of them did. 

So this retailer has the normal brick & mortar store (i.e. a store that is physically on the ground – not one that operates solely online). He also has the e-commerce website where customers can order shoes and have them delivered to their homes. 

Then if he decides to upgrade to invading the zero moment of truth, he could take a size-able chunk out of the share of the other website retailer’s 2800, and even further flatten the margins of those retailers who are doing 600 sales per month.

How?

INFILTRATING THE ZERO MARKET OF TRUTH

By being at the ZMOT, our retailer can know when consumers are looking for shoes, when they are making inquiries about them online. He can learn about consumers, their behaviors and preferences before the other retailer who also sells online, and way ahead of the others. He knows how to fish out ready customers as well as future customers. This is the wisdom of the marketers who take the ZMOT seriously.

Research shows that in 2011, 84% of a sample 5000 people in America did research on a product after seeing an advert, and before deciding on buying it. There is also more recent data to show that this trend is increasing. Now I can easily guess what just popped into your minds. 
You are going to say that that is America! 
This is Africa! 

Yes, I know. 
And yet my point here is that just because we are not a continent that is particularly keen on gathering statistical data and analyzing such data, it doesn’t mean that we do not have the same sociological tendencies of shoppers everywhere. Afterall, we are all human.

For example, if you doubt that Africans are being affected equally (if not at a quicker rate) by the New Digital Age, why not visit Christian Amanpour’s Page on Facebook, or checkout ESPN FC? 

I am willing to bet that by just doing a quick scan, you are going to find as many African names (mostly Nigerian) in the comments as any other continent of the world. 

Africans are as driven to search out their interests and engage share their thoughts with others, just as Europeans and Americans are. And I dare say, Nigerians more so than anyone else.

Hence, there’s no wisdom in betting against the continued exponential growth of internet connectivity & activity in Africa and indeed the rest of the world.

The fact is that all human beings are social animals. We all have a desire to connect with others. And most of us find connection with like-minds from foreign lands particularly more fascinating. 

In fact, with all of the poverty that we face in this continent of ours, the obvious lack of many alternatives (such as large theme parks, space museums, video game arcade centers, ice skating rinks, and a truly infinite number of satellite/cable tv channels) no doubt leads many Africans to find more time and desire to connect online.

Google’s Jim Lecinski, says, “ZMOT turns small wins into huge ones — and potentially big wins into letdowns — millions of times a day, around the clock.” The idea being conveyed here is that your well executed tactic could lead you to huge gains from doing just a little thing better than your rivals. While they, with all of their big spending and expensive tv and magazine adverts, may fail to register their presence at ZMOT and as such suffer huge losses.

Please try to remember that ZMOT is the name for the virtual meeting ground where you will find your target consumer, not rigidly the name of your tactic itself. 

Anyway, I particularly like the way Dina Howell, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi X, presents her argument on the ZMOT ( she was formerly in Procter & Gamble – at the time they came up with the First Moment Of Truth marketing model in 2005). Now she says, 

“Shoppers today want to explore and think about how products can improve their lives. They do reconnaissance to gain the insights they need, and they’re driven to bond with others and enrich relationships as they learn.”

The bottom line is that today’s marketers need to realize that shoppers’ decisions are no longer predominantly taken at Stimulus stage and Shelf (First Moment Of Truth - or FMOT) Stage. There is now clearly a 3rd pre-purchase battle ground. And from the simple bar chart above, you can tell that this battle ground      is getting more and more crowded.

The question is, 

If you were the Director of ZMOT for the marketing division of a company like say Samsung in South Africa, Kenya Airways or maybe GTBank in Nigeria, what are the things that you would do, and what is the mindset you would employ in order to garner potential customers from this abundance of ZMOT-congregating web surfers?

Please feel free to leave a comment, ask a question, like and do share. :-)