While content marketing has been a major marketing buzz word getting thrown out in the last few years, the concept of brands publishing high quality content to attract costumers is certainly not a new concept.
If you’ve seen the infographic detailing the history of content marketing, you’ll see that as early as 1895, brands like John Deere were producing magazines that featured high quality content aimed at the interests of their target demographic. And, while producing in-depth travel guides may not have seemed like an obvious choice for a tire company, Michelin established their brand in part with their Michelin Guides starting at the turn of the century.
In recent years, there have been a few companies who have taken content marketing to the next level through their digital efforts. Mindjet, a company that makes collaborative tools and work management software, has a blog called Conspire, which focuses on a breadth of topics ranging from agile business to collaborative work techniques to productivity to mind mapping and more.
Sitting on a wealth of terrific content, that helped build their brand, establish their thought leadership and reach potential customers without overtly selling anything, Mindjet decided to create a custom branded mobile application to showcase all of this terrific content.
This mobile application serves as a digital magazine of their content (a modern day version of John Deere’s Farrow Magazine of the 1890s), and is completely separate from their product’s mobile application.
Here are 3 advantages to creating custom mobile applications with your brand’s content:
1. Encourage deeper engagement with your content
While responsive design has a huge benefit to marketers, an incredible mobile reading experience is so much more than simply making your content fit on a smaller screen. Mobile is a new medium, and creating custom way for readers to interact with that content is essential to getting your readers to engage with that content.
By creating a custom mobile application (like with the Postano Mobile platform), aside from providing a more enjoyable reading experience, your readers tend to view more pages, and spend far more time with your content compared with other websites that were built with click and scroll in mind.
2. Display ads and easily add calls to action
Another added benefit to creating a branded mobile application with dynamic content is the ability to naturally show full-screen ads and/or call-to-action widgets. So, for instance, in between your full-screen articles, you can sneak in a white paper download CTA or a newsletter sign-up request without interrupting the experience.
3. Deliver dynamic content consumers crave
According to a Fourth Source survey, 73% of respondents said they would opt to download a free app associated with a brand over a non-branded, paid-for application – a statistic that demonstrates the value branded content holds for consumers. It also demonstrates the need for brands to keep their consumers’ content needs by feeding dynamic, fresh content into their mobile apps. .
In contrast to optimizing an existing web property, customized mobile assets are all about building a stand-alone content experience a user can only access through a smartphone or a tablet device.
Many brands are using this tactic to curate diverse content assets from around the web into a single, compelling mobile product. It’s a surefire way to give readers a valuable reading experience, while at the same time unifying all your efforts (like aggregating and curating all your social feeds, video, and blog content – rolled up into one awesome experience). This can driver users them to discover more content they otherwise might have missed.
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