Engagement: It’s a Mobile World Now

When we set out to do this issue’s cover story on engagement, little did we know how important mobile has become to audience interaction with digital content. Perhaps we should have known, given the obsessive focus mobile is requiring of so many publishers across the b-to-b and consumer markets these days.

The title here

The impact is more than superficial, requiring a ground-up reimagining of how content is presented online, in newsletters, how it’s shared and how it’s transacted. It’s also necessitating another round of customer research on platform and device usage and consumption habits.

In this issue’s Audience Tech department, Eli Dickinson, cofounder and CTO of Industry Dive, a b-to-b mobile media company targeting multiple verticals, notes the urgency mobile strategies have taken on. “Ignoring mobile is not really an option these days,” he says. “It’s not that the market is moving towards mobile, it’s already there.”

For b-to-b in particular, mobile has become a mission-critical platform. Paid content, directories and other consumer-facing revenue generators require an entirely new framework to function properly in mobile. And for directories—where traffic sourced from mobile devices now approaches 30 percent of the total in many cases—business depends on it.

In the case of Cygnus, which is in the process of rolling out close to 20 online buyer’s guides in a responsive design format, the lead-gen forms didn’t work when accessed from a mobile device. Business literally wasn’t getting done.

Mobile is influencing media on the most fundamental levels. Lead forms, and any other transactional form, are at the heart of customer data collection. And they’re a particularly tough puzzle to solve for mobile, which is now one of a publisher’s biggest engagement gateways. (At Industry Dive, Dickinson says they’ve created a way for readers to save a form for later, since filling one out on a smartphone can be so problematic. This potentially prevents the loss of a valuable customer.)

In any case, as publishers figure out how to improve their digital engagement metrics, mobile has become an integral component of that process.

Bill Mickey
Editorial Director
bmickey@accessintel.com
@billmickey

Engagement: It’s a Mobile World Now

SUMMER 2013 • VOL 28 NO 3

EDITORIAL OFFICE

media Group

ACCESS INTELLIGENCE, LLC