With mobile traffic now representing about 13% of all internet traffic, it's clear that mobile is well positioned to sit beside desktops as the way the world interacts online in the near future. This obviously has had and will continue to cause a number of changes in the online world. Some major trends already are the move to responsive web design, and the battle between HTML5 and apps to take full advantage of smartphones.
But for us in the B2B content marketing world, this movement to mobile brings up a major issue: since there is so little advertising space on mobile sites, how can you reach your audience on their mobile device?
When a user logs into Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter on a mobile app, they are presented with the most valuable thing they can see - their newsfeed. Unfortunately, this doesn't leave too much room for ad space given that the screens are so small.
There are two ways to view this issue:
- app makers and mobile sites need to get more creative about advertising space
- content marketers need to focus on how to get content into newsfeeds
Content marketers need to understand that getting their content into newsfeeds has far greater benefit than simply just being more visible. In fact, the movement towards mobile presents one of the most exciting opportunities in B2B content marketing in a long time: the opportunity to generate earned media.
Earned media is a term that originated in the PR world that refers to the media exposure gained by people talking about you (as opposed to paid or owned media.) It's since been taken on in social media circles as it makes a ton of sense to refer to people talking about a brand online.
The major opportunity this presents to content marketers is that they have the opportunity to massively increase their ROI on their media investments by becoming smarter about how to generate earned media. That's not to say that paid and owned media do not have a place in the content marketer playbook - they absolutely do. The best content marketers will be the ones who solve the mobile issue and generate massive amounts of earned media in doing so.
Content marketers can control a portion of their earned media and it extends beyond producing quality content. Obviously, producing great content that people naturally want to share is priority number one. People tend to share content online because it conveys status on them. For instance, people involved with digital marketing tend to share the content related to digital marketing that they believe is of the highest quality so that people will reflect on themselves.
However, since earned media involves people sharing content to their own networks and therefore entering the newsfeeds of others, content marketers can solve the mobile issue by focusing a good amount of their effort on how to seed content online to maximize its chance of being reshared. This means in addition to paid and owned, ensuring that a content strategy uses cross-posting on industry blogs, and using company advocates like employees and satisfied customers to share all company content online will ensure that content gets into feeds and visible on mobile screens.