You’ve laid the foundation of a solid mobile strategy, aligning deep customer insights with powerful and practical technologies. Now you’re ready to outfit your structure with a relevant and engaging mobile content strategy targeted to your customers’ unique motivations.
Your first goal is to consistently deliver content that resonates with your audience, but it doesn’t end there. Given how rapidly the mobile landscape is advancing and changing, you will also need to continuously evolve your apps for the latest devices, channels, integrations, and capabilities. This may sound overwhelming, but remember: you only need to tackle the content and technological advances most relevant to your customers. Just as your customer data formed the foundation of your strategy, it will continue to inform the wiring, finishing, and unique details of your brand’s mobile properties.
Flexibility Is Strength
An indestructible mobile strategy knows how to bend so it won’t break. Be prepared to continuously evolve in response to changing customer needs. The best preparation is to invest in flexible technology that will keep pace with digital progress. New mobile app development techniques are guaranteed to come; build a structure that allows you to incorporate new techniques without needing to tear down and rebuild from scratch. This will save you development costs in the long run, and ensure that you can respond to customers fast enough to maintain their trust and loyalty.
Wire Your Content to Reach Multiple Channels
Your content and brand messaging needs to seamlessly span multiple channels to mirror the ways people interact and search for information on their mobile devices. Pushing relevant content across several channels at once, or in concert, requires a coordinated team effort and carefully managed workflows. Tools such as Adobe PhoneGap let users easily create apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and can help companies of all sizes deliver music and games, educational and organizational tools, and more.
Building automation into your strategy is a smart way to make sure you don’t miss an important touch point in the customer journey. Lowe’s began using Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) to distribute Creative Ideas. The Web magazine of home improvement inspiration includes interactive do-it-yourself (DIY) content combining video tutorials and instructional guides in a mobile app format. The content is dynamic, regularly updated, intuitive to navigate, and can be accessed on Lowe’s website, and on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android devices. The content also gets published to YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, the company’s own blogger network, outside networks, and more. Similarly, money management firm Lord, Abbet & Co. used an integration between DPS and Experience Manager “to streamline asset creation and content management and easily repurpose content for mobile devices.”
Although there are many different avenues for connecting your mobile apps to customers, the aim is to deliver consistent content across channels
Build a Global Destination
Your mobile presence can be a global presence, reaching customers across cultures, languages, and latitudes. This doesn’t mean building new properties for each location. You can localize your existing assets with geolocation and translation integrations that will target content to the user’s unique context. As your brand grows, you may also consider empowering local teams to manage original content for each region, while continuing to govern your mobile content from one cohesive and interconnected interface. Open your doors to international visitors by personalizing, not redesigning, assets and content.
Mobile gives us the amazing ability to be both global and hyperlocal. A global strategy is important to the business that needs—or hopes—to scale up; and we all need geolocation to enable us to reach individuals where they are, even as they travel.
Don’t Bypass Inspections
With your mobile strategies underway, you can begin to optimize each step of the customer journey through testing and analytics. Discover your points of friction, or places of weak retention, like pages with slow load times, overly complex forms, and confusing or buried navigation buttons. Then mend the leaks and polish the fixtures by testing design and language variations.
Your customers have endless digital distractions to choose from. Make sure your every interaction is drawing them into deeper engagement with your brand, and not sending them into the arms of a competitor. With mobile apps, you can access multiple pieces of data on individual users, enabling you to personalize the experience in unique ways. When you do act on customer data, make sure you are delivering value to the user and not simply spamming them with offers.
Weather the Technological Changes
Think about the entire lifecycle of a customer and be able to adapt the mobile app experience to the engagement and purchase cycle. This will lead to greater business value and longevity in your mobile efforts. For example, rather than building a throwaway app for a single event, think about developing an app that has life long after the conference or festival is over.
Path to purchase looks radically different today than it did 10 years ago, and it will continue to evolve. Consumers expect highly relevant, context-sensitive digital experiences, regardless of their device and location. Meeting these expectations is no easy feat, but it can be accomplished with a flexible, long-term mobile marketing strategy built on advanced tools and customer insights.
Make sure your mobile experience and content can evolve. Mobile is an opportunity to take a highly personalized approach to customer engagement. What you learn in the process will become useful in future iterations, when even smaller and more context-relevant screens appear on smart watches and wearables. Most importantly, use your data to drive relevance and personalization and you’ll be able to weather the changes and competition to come.
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