Developing a Mobile Content Plan That Works

An effective mobile content plan requires marketers to understand their consumers’ personas, then use these characteristics to design content, according to industry participants.

Mobile signals such as likes, downloads, and in-app purchases can provide some of this personified information. Based on this, marketers can then define character traits that can be demographically based – such as males between the ages of 18 to 35, or iPhone 6 users – or attribute-based, which is a collection of action driven traits such as travelers or soccer moms.

Creating a Consumer Persona

“Consumer traits are important when planning your mobile content framework. With elements like device identifiers on mobile, tracking consumers’ actions is easy. Once you have created mobile personas, you can map out a customer journey for each group. Then you can bring these two pillars together to create a content strategy that is tailored to the intersection of personas and the customer journey,” says Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at mobile marketing company Fiksu.

For example, if a traveler has downloaded several travel apps in different locations and booked multiple hotels and flights via the apps, an advertiser can decide that this user is a loyal traveler and show he or she a message that is different from the one delivered to new users.

Design

While creating consumer personas is a crucial first step to building a level of context for a mobile content strategy, Adam Padilla, co-founder of creative agency Brandfire, believes that ensuring content is optimized for mobile is equally important.

“Great design in marketing and advertising is about communication, not decoration,” he says. “The design and layout of your mobile presence should be intuitive, fast-loading, and attractive. It should also offer great value for the viewer.”

As an example, Padilla points to e-commerce site, Wayfair, which has developed a well-designed mobile site to cater to online furniture shoppers.

“What I love about this site is the navigation is very visual, the galleries load quickly, and the product information is neatly organized and categorized so that each product is properly explained. It is way too easy for me to add things to my cart, and I often wind up buying more than I should, which is a testament to the power of the platform,” he explains.

For Padilla, other notable elements for making content work on mobile include using short-form that provides value, such as call-to-actions, and is tailored for your target audience. For instance, on a recipe site, one could include a few short bullets along with a picture about what makes a great chocolate mousse.

To measure it all, comments are a great indicator of how engaging your content really is. While social shares show that the audience cares enough to forward it to friends, they could just be copying and pasting your links without actually reading the content. Comments indicate that the reader is taking time out of their busy schedule to give you their thoughts on what they’ve read.