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Content Management for Mobile Devices: Smartphones, Use Cases and Best Practices in a Mobile-Centric World

JULY 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary 3 Mobile-Delivered Content Is Growing Globally 3 Start with Smartphones 4 Challenges and Opportunities 5 Use Cases Drive Mobile Content Strategy 6 Overcoming Barriers To Implementation 7 Best Practices: Build For Success 8 Conclusions 9 About CrownPeak 10

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Executive Summary

In an environment where mobile web traffic tripled last year and mobile data users are expected to outpace desktop users by next year, the need for mobile-optimized content management is clear. Yet implementing content management systems has traditionally been a slow and resource-intensive process.

One emerging strategy for successfully deploying mobile content is to focus on optimizing for smartphones, which offer both the largest and most stable mobile development platform. This approach has already proven successful in a number of market sectors and offers the advantages of simplicity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

A second strategy has been to leverage the new generation of Web Content Management systems. These systems combine breakthroughs in productivity with the ability to natively optimize content for mobile delivery, they work seamlessly with legacy systems, and typically do not require IT resources. The result is a significantly lower implementation and operation costs when compared to traditional content management solutions. Web Content Management (WCM) systems have traditionally been both time- and cost-intensive, requiring significant resources from expert developers and in- house IT.

This paper recommends adoption of such a smartphone-centric strategy with a next-generation WCM to create a flexible, scalable, interoperable mobile content management solution, without impacting legacy systems or compromising data integrity.

Mobile-Delivered Content Is Growing Globally

According to Internet Retailer, mobile web traffic more than tripled in the past year, from 4% in Q3 of 2010 to 13% in Q4 of 20111. More importantly, former Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker predicts the number of mobile users will overtake desktop users by mid-2013. Here’s a quote from the Gigaom.com article covering Meeker’s announcement2:

1 http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/01/23/mobile-traffic-hits-13-total-web- traffic-study-finds 2 http://gigaom.com/2010/04/12/mary-meeker-mobile-internet-will-soon-overtake- fixed-internet/

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Based on a comparison of adoption rates of mobile devices like iPhone and iPod versus AOL and Netscape in the early 1990s (eleven times faster), analyst Mary Meeker predicts that mobile data users will overtake desktop users by 2014.

The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini- computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: “Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened.”

In support of the evidence for rapid adoption of web-enabled mobile devices, a March 2012 Pew Research Center study3 reports nearly half (46%) of American adults now own smartphones. An earlier Pew study showed one- quarter of owners reported using their smartphones as their primary browsing device.

Start with Smartphones

For companies just getting started with mobile communications, it makes sense to keep the approach as simple as possible and start with the smartphone. The case for this approach can be made on the basis of simplicity, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, and has already proven successful at the enterprise level for companies in the pharmaceuticals, software, financial services, and consumer products sectors.

Much of the feature and standards proliferation that makes mobile content management difficult lies in the non-smartphone (“feature phone”) sector.

3 http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update- 2012.aspx?src=prc-headline

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Due to widely variant display types and capabilities, declining market share and difficulty in providing a good experience regardless of the effort expended, developing specific mobile content for these feature phones can be a losing game. Automated methods to capture web content and re-display it for the vast array of feature phones has some success, but is a poor substitute to a great and highly specific experience for the high and growing market share with smartphones.

Furthermore, smartphones represent a stable development environment, since most industry leaders are focused on the open-source WebKit layout engine.

In markets where other devices are especially common, it is possible to develop templates for them. But fewer templates mean simpler management and maintenance requirements down the line. In any case, markets without smartphones may not be consuming much mobile data to begin with.

Smartphone penetration varies significantly by market4, but mobile data usage is closely tied to smartphone adoption, making content management ROI for non- smartphones problematic.

The growth of tablet devices is consistent with the smartphone-optimized strategy as most tablets work well with both web-optimized and smartphone- optimized content.

Challenges and Opportunities

While the driving force behind adoption of a mobile content management solution is universal, the exact nature of that solution needs to be driven by specific use cases. In other words, ask how customers will use their phones to experience a companies’ website. While the universe of smartphones is

4 http://www.peppersandrogersgroup.com/blog/2011/09/stop-the-lte- madness.html

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vast, there are some characteristics they all have in common. This is a good place to start when creating a mobile content strategy.

Challenges inherent in mobile devices include the very things that make them so desirable, i.e., small size and portability. Touchscreens and keyboards make it difficult to enter data and view content, and scrolling/resizing can be tedious. Mobile devices do not support video programs like Flash5 or Silverlight. Additionally, there are a bewildering variety of browsers and platforms in use in the non-smartphone (“feature phone”) sector of the market.

However, the opportunities with mobile devices clearly outweigh the challenges. Mobile devices are always on and always with the consumer. The increasing role of apps in the mobile experience means those consumers, employees and partners are more accessible to companies than ever before. And those apps can be very specifically targeted, whether to device, geography, or consumer demographic. Mobile WCM offers a tremendous upside, both in efficiency and e-commerce.

Despite the worst economic recession since the 1930s, mobile sales revenues for major online vendors all more than doubled between 2010 and 2011, according to this 2011 KPCB slide.6

Use Cases Drive Mobile Content Strategy

When considering the different use-cases to address in your website’s user experience, it is important to first understand all the ways your website visitors interact with your content.

5 Although Adobe had developed a version of Flash for Android phones, Google desupported it as of January 2012 and removed Flash 11 from its App Store. 6 http://www.scribd.com/doc/69350884/KPCB-Internet-Trends-2011-2-1-Copy

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We suggest asking the following questions in order to get a sense of the different ways visitors use your website.  Why do they visit your site on their smartphone?  What do they do when they are there?  How long to they stay on a page?  Which pages do they abandon the most frequently and why?

Armed with these answers, you’re in a position to define the most common use case scenarios for your business. Some examples may include:  Digital sign-up or enrollment forms  Vendor or service locators  Links to social media of other interactive engagement opportunities  Downloadable apps or content  Directions to a physical location  Click-through link to a phone number  Purchase online

Use cases aren’t limited to external customers and website visitors. Most companies have use cases where mobile content management has clear advantages for both internal and external customers. For instance, there may be internal teams using mobile technology who have objectives which would benefit from content optimized for their device(s). Additionally, marketing and sales content and interfaces on existing websites may be particularly well-suited to mobile optimization.

Despite these obvious opportunities, it can be difficult to determine exactly how best to proceed. With the proliferation of standards and technologies, it can be difficult for an organization to know where to start, and mobile trends vary by geography and markets.

Overcoming Barriers To Implementation

One hurdle to launching a mobile content management system is the perception that mobile-optimized sites and content will be both time- and cost-intensive, requiring significant resources from expert developers and in- house IT. While this may have been true in the past, it no longer needs to be the case for the current generation of Web-based Content Management (WCM) tools.

New SaaS (Software as a Service) WCM systems are designed to allow seamless changes to content and templates on an as-needed basis as often

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as several times daily, without involving IT staff or outside developers. This unprecedented level of agility means that web content can now be dynamically revised and repurposed whenever necessary in response to changing market demands.

The emergence of a SaaS model for enterprise WCM offers unparalleled flexibility of implementation while remaining secure and scalable with respect to future growth. The SaaS model has been successfully adopted for WCM systems in CRM, Billing, Talent Management, and other key industry sectors. Today, SaaS WCM is ready for the enterprise, both as part of a hybrid model operating side-by-side with a legacy system and as a standalone enterprise solution.

Best Practices: Build For Success

As companies think about where to begin with their mobile solutions, there are clearly some best practices that will maximize success. Through working with our clients, we have found the following to be critical in the successful implementation of a mobile content strategy.

 Start by exploring the needs of mobile teams within the company — sales, customer service, etc., and decide if their objectives would be benefit from a mobile-specific experience. Consider whether it should be done via web (easier to develop, lower barrier to use) or with a downloadable app (more robust experience, but has to be downloaded). Agree on which devices to optimize for.

 Focus on optimizing the key use cases for mobile. Prioritize your most important use cases and optimize them for mobile first. Addressing these key use cases could increase your website conversion by a point or more. Make sure these are optimized to achieve key objectives for smartphones, tablets (if necessary), and other devices (as needed or if highly used in your market area). Content for these devices should be optimized to read as smoothly as possible in that form factor; forms and search functions should be designed to be as easy as possible to use.

 Be sure to include an “escape hatch” from the optimized experience leading back to the main web page.

 Only build an app if the desired functionality can’t be replicated within a web environment. The smartphone people work very hard to make web browsing work well on their devices — let them help you.

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 Be sure your WCM solution allows you and your agency to easily create and deploy new templates without IT help, and then target their content to specific user experiences. As mentioned previously, tablet users can often do well with smartphone-optimized content or even with no optimization at all.

 Make sure your WCM solution manages content for social media channels like Facebook or YouTube, and other new channels as they emerge offering a single interface to manage any number of channels. As new channels are added, it should be easy to create new templates for specific output(s), whether to a specific device or social media outlet.

 Keep it simple. Start with testing and optimizing key experiences for the smartphone and other critical devices for your organization. With the right WCM system in place, the path to mobile content management does not have to be especially difficult, time- consuming, or expensive.

Conclusions

With mobile data traffic scheduled to overtake desktop traffic by mid-2013, the time to set a mobile content strategy in motion is now. Fortunately, a smartphone-centric strategy is establishing itself as a leading choice for mobile content management. It has already proven successful in a number of industries and offers a clear path forward that is simple, flexible, and cost- effective.

At the same time, emergence of a new generation of enterprise-ready SaaS Web Content Management (WCM) solutions helps overcome traditional hurdles with the content management side of the problem. In addition to offering huge improvements in agility (content and format flexibility) and the ability to seamlessly switch out content or templates without using IT staff time, some of these new tools can work side-by-side with legacy systems with zero impact on security, data integrity, or interoperability.

A mobile solution such as CrownPeak’s WCM can be implemented side-by- side with an existing content management system quite rapidly, at reasonable cost, and with a completely non-invasive architecture. In any case, the time is now to be implementing a strategy around mobile content management.

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About CrownPeak

Founded in January 2001, CrownPeak was the first company to offer a cloud web content management solution. Today, the company provides web content management and website optimization software-as-a-service to hundreds of customers and thousands of business-critical websites. Built for marketers by marketers, CrownPeak’s products and services enable organizations to optimize their websites to measure and maximize business results.

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