Where are today’s netizens spending most of their time? How are they accessing their virtual selves?
Deeper connectivity and technological access have redefined lifestyle choices for modern-day netizens. It has also impacted their purchase behaviors and influences. From day-to-day activities to long-term plans: there is a solution to every problem online. Every day, more and more people are being added to this vast network.
People themselves are contributing to the information pot, making self-service the most reliable content practice of our age. To be at par with this new multi-channel brand of communication, content strategies are also changing. Automated content needs more personalization, and that can be driven by content management solutions.
It is understood that mobile devices are largely personal assets, and a comfort zone for individual users. Thus, the personalization of content in apps is more effective. Customer engagement can be performed on a variety of levels on app-based platforms:
- Sharing: Easy sharing and migration options for legacy content assets
- Interactivity: Taking desktop responsiveness to the next level
- Multimedia: Richer content access in audio-visual and other formats
- Revenue: New target segments via open app markets
Social media magnets like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Snapchat are pooling in huge budgets to make their respective user experiences more dynamic, responsive, and visually appealing. But what makes these efforts more significant is: their focus on one specific market segment—mobile and smartphone users.
E-commerce platforms have an average 60% share of mobile users in their purchases annually. In the last three years, many eCommerce websites went to the extent of making their products exclusive for mobile app purchases. Although with some initial hurdles, the trend finally got the push.
Content management for mobile apps: areas to work on
Mobile apps take digital personalization to the next level, invoking customers into the conversation. While such interactions engage the audience more deeply, they delve deep into intrinsic behavioral patterns.
It’s a win-win strategy. Such personalization demands a lot of content—both qualitatively, and quantitatively—but automation and flexibility are useful to survive in the competitive app market.
Each market has a unique set of challenges. For mobile apps, it is no different.
- Mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) have limitations when it comes to functionality, and still act as substitutes for desktops. That is why eCommerce platforms lost the initial battle of mobile app exclusivity. Internet users still deem conventional websites to be more dependable. An app-only brand might miss out on engaging desktop users, and also lose a section of app users due to lack of awareness.
- Even after a decade into the commercial market, the mobile app industry is still in its adolescence. Innovation in mobile content management is more about blind experimentation and trial-and-error formulas. Of course, studying and analyzing trends of billions of customers at an individual level is hard—even with the advanced analytics available today. The quality and relevance of content are also suffering from the differences in capabilities of the various handheld devices in use.
- Connectivity and memory constraints of mobile devices are restraining advanced apps to reach their full potential. While streaming content can prevent unauthorized users as well as remove the potential blockage of the device’s internal memory, it also compounds huge data costs for the user. On the other hand, offline downloadable content is cost-effective, but blocks device memory, and makes phone operations slower and unsecure.
Lightning-fast responsiveness and intelligent capabilities let technology bond with users. Advanced content management systems must evolve to interact like organic people rather than being robotic interfaces, especially when they are being employed to garner relationships.