The US market for tablet usage continues to grow, and nearly half the population is expected to use tablet devices by the end of the year.
Increasingly, tablets are taking on a more important role in advertising and ecommerce. Tablet usage is one of the reasons to adapt a responsive website design. In case you don’t know, a response website ‘responds’ across all desktop, laptop, netbook, tablet, and smartphone devices, and provides a better user experience across each. Today, website design operates on the idea that everything must be fluid – from the layouts, to the images, content and styling. Almost all of the web projects we do now are responsive, because it is no longer convenient or realistic to design mobile versions of websites for every device imaginable.
The next extension of responsive design is responsive content marketing – how you create content that engages on different devices, and use mobile trends to inform the content you develop and distribute.
One tablet activity in particular is seeing such rapid growth that is merits carving out a space in your responsive content marketing strategy, and that is tablet video consumption. The time US adults spend watching video on tablets is growing faster than on any other medium, and based on current trends, it’s inevitable that tablets will overtake desktops and laptops in the near future as the leading device for watching digital video.
Tablets offer the best of both worlds – they are small enough to take on the go, yet have a large enough screen size that makes them functional for many uses, including watching long and short form video.
Developing content with an eye on mobile, and specifically tablets, your goal as a marketer is simple: put more of the content users want in their hands.
Content prioritization is the first step in a user-centric approach to responsive design. That means doing an audit of your content and asking yourself “If the content is not important in a mobile environment, is it really important at all?” The smallest devices should only feature your most important pieces of content. As you work your way up in resolution size from smartphone, to tablet, to laptop and finally desktop, more content is introduced. Having a fresh, mobile-first perspective may lead you to realize that your website is overfilled with content that doesn’t support your objectives, or lead to conversions.
If a high percentage of your website traffic comes from mobile devices, a high quality video definitely warrants a space on your responsive homepage and landing pages; and an investment in video as part of your social and off-site communications is also needed. It’s fairly easy to see how much of your traffic comes from mobile if you use Google Analytics to measure website traffic, by going to “Visitors” and selecting “Mobile Devices”. It’s somewhat harder to identify tablet traffic, and tablet brand, so again, it’s important to know your audience and even do a bit of market research to confirm their tablet habits.
Remember, just because tablet users are watching more videos on their device, does not mean they are going to watch more videos that don’t engage or interest them – so you need to think beyond brand awareness. A purposeful video can guide leads through the sales funnel and enhance conversion by tapping into viewer’s emotions, and targeting buyer personas.
And just as you optimize landing pages and build full campaigns around a piece of written content to ensure it performs, you have to do the same with video. Your videos need to be professional quality, load quickly, have built in sharing functionality, and calls to action (CTAs) – either at the end of the video itself, or near the video frame.
I think the best advice might be to think about how you use your tablet – the mix of entertainment and task – and the type of branded video content you willingly watch.
