5 Mobile Trends Every Magazine Publisher NEEDS to Be Prepared For
With over 63% of all smartphone users worldwide accessing online content through their mobile devices before any other type of platform as of 2015, it should come as no surprise that the mobile platform is here to stay. If you’re a magazine publisher, however, simply dipping your toes in the proverbial mobile waters isn’t enough in and of itself to guarantee success. There are five key mobile trends in particular that are growing in such a dramatic way that every magazine publisher NEEDS to prepare for.
Mobile-First Publishing
As its name suggests, this is the idea that you should be creating content for the mobile space FIRST, at which point you will then build out for all other platforms from there. This makes a large amount of sense: it allows you to get high quality content with a perfect user experience out to your largest core audience as quickly as possible while still giving you a foundation to build from in terms of things like desktops and other distribution channels.
Web Apps
Speaking of foundations, if you’re looking for a sure-fire way to build a strong, wide-reaching mobile presence, look no farther than web apps over native apps. While native apps are absolutely essential and should be on every magazine publisher’s priority list, web apps have their own unique set of advantages. For starters, you’re designing a web app ONCE that then works flawlessly on all platforms regardless of device. It allows you to create a consistent brand experience, regardless of whether your users are on an iPhone or a Galaxy or something else entirely.
SMS Marketing
One of the biggest advantages that the mobile platform brings to magazine publishers is that these aren’t just powerful little computers people are carrying around with them at all times – they’re also still smartphones. As a result, you now have a direct line to your readers in the form of an SMS text message that you can guarantee they’ll receive instantly – something that you can’t say about desktop users, for example. The right SMS marketing strategies is a great way to connect to your target audience in a much more meaningful, intimate way than ever before.
Native advertising creates something of a “best of both worlds” scenario. It lets magazine publishers generate the type of ad revenue they need to survive in a crowded marketplace, but it also includes those ads in existing, high-quality content in an organic way that adds to the reader’s experience instead of detracting from it.
Hypertargeting Readers
On the mobile platform, analytics tracking and marketing strategies in general have become so advanced that each article in your mobile edition can be treated on an individual basis. This is opposed to a print version of the same material, where the issue itself is treated as a whole. So think about it like this: if someone shares a print copy of your magazine, it’s hard to know exactly WHY so that you can target that type of behavior again.
With mobile pieces, however, articles can be individually shared. This gives you valuable (and most importantly, actionable) insight into what type of content your readers like, what type of content they’re ignoring, where they’re most likely to share those pieces and more – all of which can the be used for even more natural, specific marketing campaigns in the future!
