For most businesses, mobility is central to their plans for the future — and if it isn’t, that company is headed for a rude awakening. Indeed, many companies are already making deep investments in mobile, even if they aren’t sure of the best approach. What they do know is that their customers are rapidly migrating to mobile, using it to find companies, products and services.
Content, in its many forms, is a cornerstone of any mobile strategy, and it requires its own mobile-specific content management strategy to be effective. It doesn’t take long for a company’s mobile efforts to grow from a side venture into a fully functioning arm of your marketing department. Enterprises must then make sure they take the necessary measures to make their content optimized for mobile and supportive of their mobile initiatives.
Here’s a quick rundown of some steps every company should take:
1. All content must be optimized for mobile
Not only should your brand have a mobile-optimized website, but each individual piece of content needs to be created with a mobile audience in mind. Written content should be shorter than what performs best on desktops because mobile readers don’t go that far in-depth. Images should be formatted for mobile, too, and any media content embedded into web page content needs to be mobile-friendly.
Social media content is convenient for a mobile strategy because all the major platforms already accommodate mobile very well. However, one area enterprises might not be adequately focused on is their email content, especially newsletters. With so many consumers using mobile to check their email, content that isn’t optimized for smartphones and tablets is almost guaranteed to throw away potential ROI.
2. Mobile deployments should be tested and vetted
Rigorous testing should be done to ensure an app is ready to go live. This applies to consumer-facing apps as well as employee solutions aimed to increase productivity. Once it launches, you can’t walk back the negative effects of a glitchy experience or a frustrating consumer experience. A mobile app can be a great way to strengthen ties and brand exposure with consumers. However, those consumers are notoriously impatient with imperfect mobile apps, and if yours stumbles out of the gate, it’s a strong candidate for mass deletion.
The damage isn’t as severe for in-house solutions, but mistakes could still erode faith in your ability to build a comprehensive mobile content front — and detractors will include not just the app users themselves, but also the executives green-lighting your strategies.
3. Build mobile-friendly calls-to-action
Mobile-specific CTAs can include pop-ups to download your company’s app or encouragement to follow the brand on social media. These are simple, mobile-friendly ways to deepen a relationship by using content to reach your target audience, while also opening the door to further content engagement in the future.
4. An ECM solution may be needed
As CIO noted, there has been some debate over the ongoing need for an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Some experts think cloud-based storage and big data indexing is an effective alternative at a lower cost. That may or may not be true, and it’s a debate best settled on a case-by-case basis by examining the needs of each individual company. If you’re a company that has no ECM solution in place, it’s worth at least looking into as a means of improving your current mobile content strategy.
The platform of your choosing may not be a perfect solution, but it almost certainly beats having no management solution in place at all. You can always upgrade or change your approach in the future, but ECM may be a valuable investment for companies just getting their feet wet.
5. Mobile requires its own analytics
Mobile behavior is fundamentally different from behavior on desktops. As such, it needs its own analytics to gauge the efficacy of content, mobile apps and everything else on the mobile front. You’ll need to invest in a solution that can evaluate the mobile performance of your content in terms that are relevant to your goals and your target audience.
If your competitors aren’t already embracing mobile content as a major strategy, it’s only a matter of time. Yet the true differentiating factor will be how well each company uses mobile to reach new audiences, heighten customer engagement, build positive brand experiences and expand its own brand footprint. Every aspect of your content management strategy should be designed with these objectives in mind.
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