What is mobile content marketing?

Josh Anish

January 10, 2014

What Does Mobile Content Marketing Look Like?

Even a reluctant glance at your Twitter or LinkedIn feed in 2013 couldn’t shield you from ascension of content marketing as a major topic of inquiry. Shit, you could even argue that the very act of browsing LinkedIn and Twitter for articles is itself part of the ever-spreading content marketing apparatus.

And of course the social behemoths of Silicon Valley aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Well actually that’s not objectively true: Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are going somewhere — and that’s to mobile, and more so daily.

These platforms each have mobile apps famous from Reno to Reykjavik, but while it’s safe to say the marketing form factor has adjusted to meet the itinerant preferences of customers, the nature of the content has remained static for years.

Yes blog posts have pretty much been condensed to tweets, and photo sharing sites have been shrunk into Instagram and the FB app.

But many other marketing channels have failed to morph with the new mediums. Take email, for example. It would be disingenuous to say that it isn’t easy receiving emails on our phones. But why are we still stuck to the decade-old dichotomy of text vs. HTML emails? Email should be thought of as a form of content marketing for mobile devices, and as such those platforms should have access to all the latest presentation tools.

Companies shouldn’t have to build new templates and use valuable (and expensive) development resources to create interesting emails. Instead, email should snap easily into your broader content marketing strategy. Why can’t emails easily look like blog posts? Even better: Why aren’t emails blog posts themselves? Social media posts are popping up everywhere, but emails have been anchored to our inboxes, tied to an outdated bollard of static text vs. static HTML. Why can’t emails feature three videos and a Google Map? Or have a slideshow to share a series of high-resolution images? Yes you can currently build all these things but they take hours and hours of development work, especially for mobile.

In 2014, look for mobile content marketing to arrive as a new “thing.” Think of it as something analogous to a “tweet” or a “status update,” but also a brand new shell delivering mobile marketing content from businesses to consumers, wherever they are.

Another buzzword from last year was “native.” I’m not always sure what that word means when it comes to the Internets, but in this context I’m super keen on mobile marketing content originating from mobile devices, rather than getting developed on desktop and then getting shoved into a different format. In other words, mobile content marketing will be created from our phones.

This same new “thing” — the shell delivering mobile content — will publish it on more than just email. We will start to see these things pop up across social media channels and SMS as well; high quality content items produced on mobile, optimized for hand-held devices.

It will become easier to write on pictures. We’ll also be able to capture business moments — such as the arrival of new red velvet cupcakes — with our phones, and then share the news immediately with our email contacts in seconds. Text messages will become much more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing.

So this is all a long, evasive way of saying that I’m not totally sure what mobile content marketing will look like. But what I do know is that we haven’t seen it yet, and when we do it will emerge as the major new marketing channels for businesses of all sizes.