The building blocks

If we were to take a closer look at what’s actually involved with “delivering relevant content in a high-quality environment” we’d find that the answers differ between organisations and the audiences they serve, but there are some universal requirements for any software platform.

Build it, and they will come

As we’ve seen, whatever your content, and whoever your audience, you’ll need to deliver high-quality, mobile-first experiences if you’re going to meet customer expectations. To do that, you’ll need a mix of web (including mobile web), and native apps to support your content creators.

And that is exactly where many content strategies can start to go off the rails. To keep on track, businesses need to assess their existing processes, and be realistic about their resources. 

Given unlimited time and budget, a business could hire specialist developers to build out a responsive website, and bespoke apps for Android and iOS from the ground up. They could hand code every feature, be on-call to deal with service issues, stay on top of platform updates, and all that good stuff. The problem, of course, is that no organisation works with zero time or budget constraints.

Even if your business does have the resources to develop for every platform, it’s important to consider whether you should. Organisations with specialised software, such as Facebook, or Slack might need bespoke architecture, but if your use-case is content delivery (for everything from news and whitepapers, to how-to guides and product manuals), existing platforms can save precious resources in both the short and the long term.

Decisions, decisions

Finally then, how can you decide? What are the factors to consider when choosing a platform to underpin your mobile apps? As we’ve already mentioned, every business is different, so the following is only a start-point which you’ll need to expand upon, but we find these are key comparison points in almost every deployment. By ranking each factor from good (10) to bad (0), you’ll be able to create an ultimate score per option, for easy comparison.

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