Specialist Media Show * Exhibition * Workshops * Conference * Intelligence * Networking * 24 May 2012 ThinkTank Birmingham

Whether you are a consumer or business publisher, you either are planning your mobile strategy or tuning the one you already have in place. This market doesn't stand still, and so there's always value in learning from your peers, wherever you are on your mobile journey. Inspired by the speakers at the Mobile Media Strategies conference on 25 September, organised by the Media Briefing, here's five ideas for taking the next steps in your mobile publishing strategy:

1. Know what devices your audience are using

There's more data than ever available now on how consumers and business people are using their multiple screens to keep up with news and consume content. You can split your web traffic by device and day part, monitor when and on what device your readers open your emails, and track when they are using tablets. You can even run old-fashioned surveys to understand how the digital jigsaw fits together. All this intelligence can help publishers prioritise the platforms and devices to focus on.

2. Use mobile to drive total subscriptions

Including a tablet or mobile app in a subscription package is a great incentive to sign up more subscribers. The FT is a past master at this approach. 14% of their audience read FT content on at least two devices each day. Overall ft.com subs are up 30% year on year to over 300,000. Mobile accounts for 25% of ft.com traffic and generates 15% of new subs. They expect half of ft.com access to be via mobile within 3 years. Those of us with smaller tech teams and rather less well-known brands can still adopt the multi-platform subscription approach.

3. Expand revenue with one-off content sales

But there are plenty of readers who don't want a subscription - I recall the example from Autosport where they had more success selling a single article for 89p than a week's subscription for 88p. Future have learnt that 55% of their ipad magazine purchases are one-offs, rather than subscriptions. And mobile really expands an audience beyond traditional boundaries. 90% of Future's iPad sales are to new customers. So let a wider audience sample your content on mobile rather than locking all into subs. The fast feedback on digital means that you can rapidly evolve your pricing strategies.

4. Try a functional app in your market

Publishers are beginning to experiment with mobile apps that are neither print replicas nor re-imagined interactive magazines. Haymarket's StatsZone provides football fans with graphical versions of match stats. They don't make much on the £1.49 cover price, but have attracted lucrative sponsorship. Dennis have just launched a game, Split Decision, very loosely based on their magazine Mental Floss. The development team didn't include any publishers, but it is targeted at the same audience, so they can cross promote from the mag. Launched on 23 Aug, it's already rated 4 stars.

5. Explore the ad landscape

There's been so much focus on subscription-driven mobile models that the ad proposition has been overlooked. Yet the affluent, engaged, targeted audience on mobile is appealing to many advertisers. Recently the focus has been on sponsorship deals, but as digital ABCs expand, become more of a currency for agencies and the volumes start to get into the thousands, advertising revenue could well exceed circulation. And many b2b magazine apps have been highly successful with a free, ad supported model.

Open your mind to new mobile business models at the Mobile Media Strategies conference on 25 September, with speakers from FT, Future, Dennis, Informa, Guardian, plus pricing experts and tips on the mobile ad landscape from Google.

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