Growing Use of Tablets Leads to New Emphasis on Digital Marketing Skills

Tablets are on their way to becoming the preferred computing device for millions of people around the world, according to analysts like Forrester Research, and that shift has big implications for the marketing industry.

With the change from traditional PCs to tablet devices, marketers, designers and content producers also need to adjust their skills so they can better communicate through a tablet format.

Chris Reynolds, vice president of marketing analytics at Condé Nast, recently discussed how the new use of tablets has revolutionized publishing, and how his company responded.

The emergence of the tablet is actually a good thing for magazine publishers like Condé Nast, Reynolds said in a ZDNet interview, as magazine formats have much more in common with tablet formats than with websites on PC internet browsers. That similarity made it easier to adapt the company’s basic product to a digitized format.

“The way you navigate a website is not the way you navigate magazine content,” he said in the interview. The emphasis on mobile formats appears to have paid off: As ZDNet noted, mobile traffic for Condé Nast accounted for 24 percent of all digital visits in January 2013, compared to just 6 percent two years prior.

The company also had significant data on its print publication readership, and Reynold’s team was able to segment the combined data from both print and digital readership to improve their publications and better target their marketing efforts. Reynolds believes that the tablet format made it easier not only for Condé Nast but the entire print community to move into digital content production and distribution.

Condé Nast’s experience demonstrates how new technology is changing the field of marketing.

The rising use of tablets and mobile devices, as well as the need for more targeted marketing data, has led to new marketing roles at many companies. Such roles include content marketing strategist, data scientist and social media manager. Companies require skilled employees to fill these roles.

Schools and universities are responding by offering new programs to train these professionals, such as the major in digital marketing from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Such programs can prepare students with skills specific to digital media, such as the ability to parse marketing metrics, as well as traditional marketing knowledge.

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