How marketers are tailoring their content strategy for a multi-channel, multi-device world

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We’re living in a technologically empowered age where smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and e-readers reign supreme and customers are spoilt for choice not just for the content, but for the platform they wish to view it on.

Fortunately, content is still king for consumers. And the top marketers in the industry are the ones that can tap into the power of connected data and understand what sparks and sustains user interaction across different platforms.

The key to building a solid multi-platform content strategy is to have a keen understanding of the limitations of new technology and how you can create tailored content for each platform. And that demands a highly dynamic content strategy that offers a unique experience to users across each channel.

Your customer is a moving target, and you need to be fully tuned into their content consumption habits and device preferences to actively adapt your content strategy for attracting the right audience.

Making mobile a priority is non-negotiable

At this point, denying the impact of mobile marketing is like trying to contest the existence of gravity. According to a 2014 comScore report, 31 percent of content published by top media entities is viewed solely on smartphones and more than half of U.S. users spend the majority of their time consuming digital media with mobile apps. Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook collectively topped the list for highest combined platform usage.

A recent study conducted by Millward Brown revealed that nearly 60 percent of buyers use mobile devices to research their purchases.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the intrinsic value of your content in the eyes of mobile-savvy users instantly shoots up if your brand maintains a consistent multi-platform presence. However, you need to keep in mind that content relevance means a lot more than multi-channel presence.

Here are some of the most rewarding practices used by content marketers to captivate mobile users:

1. Make it locally relevant

Whether you’re setting up a mobile-optimized website or a mobile app, location plays a monumental role in determining your audience’s content consumption habits.

According to a mobile media consumption study done by Pew Research Center, 74 percent of adult smartphone owners ages 18 and older say they use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location. Location-enabled services in apps allow marketers to target consumers at the right time – and right place – giving marketers a golden opportunity to serve location-specific content to consumers and make their brand interactions worthwhile.

For example, Blis Media helped Spotify produce excellent results by serving ads in airport coffee shops based on the assumption that people would be inclined to purchase last-minute travel entertainment.

Foursquare, Waze, Tinder, and Google Now have also done a splendid job delivering high quality location-specific content through the efficient use of big data. You can easily entice people walking by your store to walk in simply by offering a sweet check-in deal on Facebook or Foursquare.

2. Optimize for push messaging

Thanks to this newfound context-driven approach, content marketing through messaging for apps has become a lot more productive.

The highest click rates come from short messages (10 or fewer words) packed with words like “offer,” “super,” “ends” and “deal”. A 2014 Localytics report on push messaging revealed that there’s a 66 percent higher click rate on push messages that are sent on weekdays, and the ideal time to send them to users is between 12 p.m to 5 p.m.

Make your content relevant and timely by sending offers and updates on products users have viewed before. For instance, a user may have abandoned their online shopping cart with a few Burberry clothing items for some unknown reason in the past. By following up with a notification like “Your favorite item: Burberry Check Coat – now 20% off”, you have a high chance of rekindling the transaction.

3. Prioritize visual content

Social Bakers looked at the top 10 percent of posts made by more than 30,000 Facebook brand pages and found that posts with photos saw the most engagement—accounting for a whopping 87 percent of total interactions.

Mobile consumers strongly prefer rich visual content over text-heavy content due to the limitation of screen space and straightforward nature of the brand communication. Therefore, opting for catchy infographics and visually striking banners to promote your brand will prove to be a lot more engaging.

4. Champion responsive design

If you’re aiming to deliver a seamless content interaction experience to your customers across different platforms, then investing in responsive design should be on the top of your priority list – particularly if you haven’t yet invested in a mobile app. It allows automatic optimization of content across devices for effortless navigation and eliminates the need to create a mobile version of your website.

Big players in the media industry like USA Today and Disney have implemented responsive design across a number of their properties to streamline the cross-platform content experience for audiences.

Here are some of the key elements involved in implementing responsive design for marketing content across mobile devices:

• Readability –to make sure that your message is easily visible, use at least 14 point fonts.
• Navigability — to accommodate finger tapping for navigation more efficiently, avoid cluttering the page with unnecessary elements and create big buttons.
• Adaptability — to target users more effectively, leverage the power of big data to change specific elements of your website, ad, or email body based on the past interactions of the user. Amazon’s brilliant recommendation engine is one of the best examples of dynamic content strategy.
• Granularity — to deliver your content effectively across all platforms, plan it in such a way that you can break down your content into shareable tweets, Facebook posts, quotes, etc. without losing the authenticity of your brand message.
• Action Potential — to focus your reader’s attention on the key points, use a single column to structure your content and place your call-to-action at the top of the screen.

It’s not easy to ignore that the always-on nature of social media can be a really intimidating factor in devising your content marketing strategy, not to mention the need to continually feed other content across your owned properties. However, if your content is crisp and you know your consumer profile and the best way to reach them, then delivering a seamless multi-platform content experience is not a dream so far-fetched.

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