Driving Better Mobile Engagement With Your Content

July 14, 2014
Published in Demanding Views

By Paul Danter, VP of Sales and Marketing, Genwi

Danter will be covering the topic of mobile content as part of the Lead LifeCycle Series #LLCSeries, a week-long series of webinars offering case study examples and best practices covering each stage the buying cycle. Check out the agenda and register once for the entire series.

We all know that mobile is becoming the device of choice for accessing, referencing and researching most types of information. It’s instantly on, always connected and almost always available.

According to IDC, "by 2015, more Americans will access online content from a mobile device than through a desktop computer." Use any form of public transportation and you’ll know this to be true.

As marketers, we need to think about what this means as our buyers access and interact with our content. I’m not talking about revamping the ways in which we already distribute content — I’m addressing a deeper understanding about the ways people access, share and interact with companies through their mobile devices.

One mistake that marketers make is thinking that they just need to provide a “mobile-friendly” site. Responsive design is not the key — it’s a Band-Aid fix. It usually assumes mobile users follow the same access paradigm as desktop users (think how hard is it to navigate the average corporate from a desktop!).

Today, your mobile audience likely interact with you through many channels. These could be email, Twitter, social promotions, ads, landing pages, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. Not only should those channels (that are in your control) be optimized for mobile, but more importantly, the destination that these channels lead your audience to, must be as well.

Let’s think about a worst- and best-case scenario:

Vertiflash — “a cloud-based virtual big data social mesh holistic system” — is about to launch a campaign to promote an eBook. They’ve spent a vast amount of time producing the content, designing the layout and planning its promotion. The problem is that, the email template they use to target their email database is HTML and not mobile friendly, the landing page is made for desktop and the eBook is delivered as a PDF (formatted for US Letter).

Birkengrind — “a Shoreditch based DIY retro authentic coffee company” — is about to launch a campaign to promote its coffee by providing free drink recipes. They plan to promote links to individual recipe “landing pages” (mobile friendly, of course), which will also offer other recipes and the products needed to make them (through deeper engagement via a web-app). This ultimately also promotes a native app, to give buyers offline access to recipes, products, rewards programs and more. In addition, all of their promotional links to those recipes launch directly into the native app for existing users, helping them drive usage and better engagement.

The second example is ideal and it may seem like you are a long way from being able to deliver on something like that. But there are only a few things you need to think about to help ensure you can be able to drive better mobile engagement in this way.

1. Structure Your Content — To work in more places, content needs to be described better. And by “better”, I mean separating “content” from “layout.” It’s hard because we all like to produce well designed and packaged material, but the long term value in content is in its re-usability. So content will need to be repackaged for different delivery mechanisms, audiences and access methods. Adaptive content is key.

2. Organize Content for Easier Access — For each piece of content that you create there needs to be a second piece of content that describes it — and how to use it. This means, you need to be able to associate your content with meta-data, which will help buyers find content easier (as descriptive meta-data will yield better results) and will also help you provide contextually relevant information based on what you know about any given user, so you can offer the right piece of content at the right time (to grease the wheels of the “buyer’s journey”).

3. Promotion With Mobile In Mind — Audiences need choice and direction and as marketers, we should always lead them to the best possible branded experience. That means allowing web access, but also offering a deeper, richer and more immersive experience via applications, when appropriate. We call this “progressive engagement”, which is what our second example was employing to engage users and keep them coming back, no matter which access method they used.

What works for your company will of course vary. But know that your competitors are looking at what will give them an edge — and mobile continues to be the untamed opportunity to get in front of your audience first.

Paul Danter is VP of Sales and Marketing for Genwi, a provider of technology that enables marketing teams to distribute information, gathered from multiple sources, to mobile devices in real-time.