The Ideal Content for Mobile Platforms

Catering to mobile platforms has become an essential part of online marketing. Big screen content doesn't always make a smooth transition to mobile. Learn about the best mobile content practices! If your company is investing in online marketing, you're likely looking at a variety of different strategies. While it's easy to treat each strategy separately, it's worth considering where you can find an overlap, especially in terms of making your marketing dollars go further. Mobile marketing offers the opportunity to take your other marketing strategies to a new platform. When you combine your mobile marketing efforts with your content marketing strategies, you can make wider use of your content across different platforms. You'll need to identify which parts of your content will perform well on mobile devices.

Format for Mobile

Unfortunately, you can't just take content that you created for the web and dump into an app or a mobile-optimized website. Content that does well on big screens doesn't always translate to smaller screens. There are several factors you need to consider when reformatting your content:
- Short is crucial: While people can read longer pieces on their mobile devices, the structures need to be shorter. A paragraph should fit on one screen, so that the content is easier to understand.
- Download times dictate what people consume: If a video (or anything else) takes too long to download, many visitors will just move on to something else. If you've got big files, you have to find a way to make them smaller.
- Apps give you more options: Provided that you can produce a valuable resource for your audience, creating an app to house your content in a mobile setting may make sense. Even if a true app isn't the right fit, a mobile site may provide you with more opportunities than making your main website mobile-friendly.
Whatever content you have at hand can be converted into a format that works on mobile platforms. Investing the necessary time to translate your existing content is almost always a better option that creating entirely new content for each platform.

Consumers are on Mobile

The numbers are clear: media consumers rely heavily on mobile. More than 40 percent of U.S. adults own smart phones and 18 percent have tablets. Those numbers keep going up -- the ownership of tablets doubled in the last year. These users consume content based on whatever device is closest, with 23 percent of adults reporting that they get their news on at least two different devices. More than a third of mobile device users report that they get news by going directly to their preferred news website or app -- which may be unexpected. The numbers show that different groups of users have very different consumption habits: while users who own both a tablet and a smartphone rely on social media to direct them to the news or are willing to search for keywords, users who own only one mobile device, as well as those who rely on a desktop or laptop, are more likely to be devoted to individual sites. As the number of mobile device owners increases, the amount of mobile content consumed will only continue to go up.

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