Mobile growth is accelerating, driven by broadband access and new devices. No business can ignore this predicted $3 trillion global market by 2017. The opening keynote at SIPA in Washington DC was from Terry Waters of Yankee Group, both an observer and analyst of mobile trends and also a business that has had to reinvent itself for mobile. Rapid growth areas in mobile are cloud apps, m commerce and video. Publishers will need to think very differently about their businesses to successfully adapt for mobile. Here’s his top tips plus his own story of adapting for mobile…
Mobile strategies – Yankee Group
Design around mobile experiences, not content
Users have become dependent on their mobile devices in a frighteningly short period of time, with 63% saying they need to be connected at all times. A well-designed mobile strategy covers marketing, for example using tailored mobile coupons, offering transactional capability, enhancing the experience to build loyalty and offering excellent customer care.
A great customer experience has to offer the convenience of a simple process, seamless connectivity across multiple platforms, and context or relevance to a user’s location, situation and preferences.
Choose the smartphone ecosystem that matches your strategy
Each mobile ecosystem has a different centre of gravity, eg Android excels at cloud services and advertising, while ioS has the best on-device apps, and Blackberry is great for security.
The future of mobile is video
Video on mobile will remake the traditional entertainment business. 37% of users watch video on tablet every day, and 32% watch on smartphones. Netflix has exploited this cleverly with its one price, multi device service – now the largest paid video service in the US. Traditional publishers must work out how to create video content to fuel their mobile growth.
Delivering a mobile experience requires partnerships
Publishers will have to partner to provide seamless mobile experiences, mobile commerce and customer care… this is an increasingly important skill.
Think mobile first, don’t translate from desktop
Rather than adapt a standard website to mobile, publishers need to consider the mobile experience first, and then build back to the desktop website.
Personalise the experience and put user in control
Marketing at the right time with the right (personalised) message can improve results by 40%, so it’s essential to put the user in control of their experience and tailor messages to location and behaviour. Walmart find that 10% of online sales happen when the customer is in the store. It’s now crucial to be able to use behavioural data to send the right messages.
How Yankee Group reinvented their business for mobile
As a research and advisory firm, Yankee Group had to adapt to change and the growth of mobile – clients felt they had no time to read research reports, and wanted to get quickly from information to actionable, revenue-generating insight. Most B2B content is dense and not adapted for tablet. So Yankee created a daily news service optimised for mobile, and designed weekly, monthly and quarterly dashboards that were built first for iPad and far more visual, easy to navigate and shareable.
You’ll be able to get more insights on winning mobile publishing strategies from speakers at the SIIA Digital Content & Media Summit, 23-25 September in London. Learn from publishers such as Dennis, Future, Informa, Immediate, Economist, Electric Word, BMJ, Les Echos and many more. Connect with your peers and hear how they are tackling the latest challenges in digital media. Read more about the programme.
Carolyn Morgan has launched, acquired, grown & sold specialist media businesses in print, web and events. She launched the Specialist Media Show in 2010 and grew a community of ambitious publishers keen to grow their digital activity. SIIA acquired the Specialist Media Show in 2013 and Carolyn is now Programme Director for SIIA UK. Follow Carolyn on twitter at @siiauk.