The world had already gone digital, and now it has gone mobile. More and more people have started viewing websites mostly on their mobile devices – and businesses need to keep that in mind and react quickly if they want to maintain their positions in the market.
sadly, what most businesses do in response to this is focus on usability and on building adaptive websites. While this is important, there are other things that also matter a lot.
Yes, We are talking about content now.
As you know, content is the king of modern marketing and a crucial part of every marketing strategy. At the same time, many marketers still develop their strategies without taking new tendencies into consideration.
If most people view websites on their mobile devices, it’s important to adapt the content so it looks good when viewed on any mobile app.
Here’s what you can do to achieve that.
Of course, knowing your target audience is important. However, we’re not talking about their basic characteristics (like age, gender, etc.). When it comes to adapting the content for mobile devices, here’s a couple of things you need to pay special attention to:
- Do your readers read your website on their smartphones or do they prefer tablets instead?
- Is visual content popular among them?
- What percentage of your readers views content on mobile devices?
- Which type of content do they share the most?
Answering these questions can help you make your mobile content strategy more specific, and therefore successful. For example, if the majority of your audience views your content on tablets, you will have more space for headlines, and so on.
When it comes to web content, long headlines seem more impressive. True, many pieces of research showed that headlines that are 8-10 words or even more attract more readers. However, that works well only when people view your website on their PCs or laptops.
When it comes to mobile devices, the situation is quite the opposite. Imagine what will happen to a long headline when it’s resized to fit a mobile screen? Naturally, it will suddenly take more than two or three lines of text instead of one. Moreover, when a headline is too long, it can even get lost below the fold – and you wouldn’t want that, would you?
That’s why it’s better to write short yet catchy headlines if you make content for mobile devices.
We know that images attract more people, that posts with images are shared more often, and so on. Indeed, people like images even when it comes to mobile content – research shows that their eyes are immediately drawn to the image when they see it.
The thing is that it’s not good if we’re talking about text content. The images can distract the attention of the readers from the rest of the text and take some of the precious display space at the same time. You can still use them; just make sure that there aren’t too many images in the text and that they are placed not too close to each other.
The trick (and the challenge) of mobile content is to present as much content as possible on a relatively small screen. That’s why while concise texts are always important, they become crucial when it comes to mobile apps. The more unnecessary words, sentences, and points you put in your content, the higher is the possibility that the readers will simply quit reading it.
Some think that this means that the articles should be short too. But that’s not true. You can write as much as you want as long as your writing is polished and concrete.
Sure, it isn’t a rule. What is a rule, though, is to make mobile content as informative and valuable as possible – which can rarely be achieved if you write a 500-word article.
While we know that the attention span is shorter these days, this actually doesn’t mean that people prefer shorter articles. They prefer the ones that are better written and more interesting to them. Of course, the way you present your writing plays a huge role in it – if you manage to hook the readers with the introduction sentences, they’ll most likely read your article till the end.
Wrapping this up, I can confidently say that writing content for mobile apps is challenging for many. As many rules regarding web content don’t apply to mobile content, some people might struggle when coming up with the right content strategy. But as soon as you understand these rules, you’ll be able to make your content strong and appealing to the mobile users.
