How to plan and execute a mobile content management strategy

If you're like most companies, you spend about half of your marketing budget on mobile advertising. Creating an effective mobile content management strategy can help you get the most out of that spending.

Image Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/19792/global-mobile-ad-spending-distribution-by-platform/ 

A mobile content management strategy will help you determine what content you want to share with mobile users and how you want to share it

Let’s first get started by understanding what mobile content management is.

Key takeaways

• Mobile content management provides easy access to your organization's digital content across a variety of mobile devices.

• Your mobile content management strategy can be either device-specific or device-agnostic and employ either traditional or headless CMS.

• When executing a mobile content strategy, make sure you have a sufficiently skilled staff or employ an experienced outside firm.

What is mobile content management?

Mobile content management (MCM) involves several technologies to provide easy, efficient and secure access to your organization's digital content and assets from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. MCM solutions are typically built around a content management platform and often include collaboration and communication features. 

An MCM system enables you to create, publish and manage content through a central system. You can publish text, images, podcasts, videos and other media types, all formatted for best consumption on mobile devices. 

Mobile content management features

Most MCM solutions incorporate the following key features:

• Content delivery across multiple channels

• Content delivery across multiple devices

• Content delivery of all key data types and file formats

• Templating options for a variety of mobile devices

• Targeted content delivery based on device's GPS location

• Faster load times than traditional content management system platforms

• Access control, including authorization and authentication, for protected content on mobile apps

Key benefits of a mobile content management strategy

Does your organization need a mobile content management strategy? Given that mobile access accounts for more than half of all internet traffic, the answer is a definite yes. 

Image Source: https://writersblocklive.com/blog/what-percentage-of-internet-traffic-is-mobile/

Here are some of the important benefits you can leverage from initiating a robust mobile content management strategy:

• Presents content in the ideal format for all types of mobile devices

• Enables you to publish content in real time

• Permits sharing of core content across multiple channels and multiple devices

• Allows your marketing messages to be seen by larger audiences

• Enables location-specific marketing messages and promotions

• Supports content creation and editing from any location or device

• Increases your staff's productivity

• Presents a cost-effective way to promote your company, brand and products

Planning a mobile content management strategy

Deploying an MCM system may sound like a difficult challenge, one that involves a lot of time and money. That doesn't have to be the case if you do the proper planning up front. Here are some of the issues you need to take into account.

Device-specific vs. device-agnostic

You can take two basic approaches to presenting your content on mobile devices. You can choose to employ device-specific or device-agnostic designs. Both have their pros and cons.

A device-specific approach utilizes mobile-first design to create a unique user experience for each device. This approach can be time consuming, expensive and require frequent costly upgrades. It is not a flexible approach, even though it can result in an experience tailored for users of specific devices. 

A device-agnostic approach employs what is called responsive design to deliver a single version of your app or website that automatically adjusts to the size and shape of any mobile screen. This approach might not fully optimize your content for specific devices, but it does offer consistency of design across all devices. It's also more efficient and cost-effective – only a single design is needed, and that design automatically works for new and updated devices. 

Traditional vs. headless CMS

Finally, you need to determine what type of CMS you want to employ for your mobile content – a traditional or a headless CMS. 

With a traditional CMS, the backend content and frontend presentation are tightly integrated. It's a simple approach best suited for single touchpoints. It doesn't allow for device-agnostic design or the porting of content to multiple sites, platforms or devices. 

A headless CMS separates the backend content from the frontend presentation layer. The CMS itself is focused solely on storing and delivering content. The display of that content is delegated to individual apps and websites, the front and back ends linked via an API. This enables you to change the frontend display at any time without affecting the backend content. Likewise, any content changes are automatically pushed out to the various frontend displays. 

The following video explains how a headless CMS works and why it's often the preferred solution.

Executing your strategy

After you've planned your mobile content management strategy, it's time to implement that solution. This presents another choice – you can handle the deployment internally or go with a third-party solution. If you opt for internal deployment, you'll need to have dedicated and adequate staff and make sure they have the requisite skills. 

Going with a third-party solution, such as that offered by Optimizely, can be more cost-effective and provide more functionality from day one. 

Let Optimizely help you plan and execute your mobile content management strategy 

Optimizely's Optimizely CMS is the ideal CMS for mobile content management. It combines headless content management with media management and drag-and-drop authoring to not only manage your valuable content but deliver compelling experiences to your company's core audience. With Optimizely CMS, you can create once and publish everywhere – including today's most popular mobile devices.