Tablets are becoming one of the preferred ways for certain people to consume content.
It’s important to understand that people have always consumed content. Whether it’s print or digital it’s important to focus on creating content that fits your target customer.
For tablets, it’s important to understand first who the readers are and second the type of content those people consuming.
There is a new study featured on eMarketer from comScore that sheds some interesting light on who is using tablets to read the news and to read magazines.
From Who’s Reading Magazines and Newspapers on Tablets?:
comScore reported that male tablet users overindexed for both newspaper and magazine reading on the devices, with men making up 57.5% of the newspaper audience and 54.6% of the audience for magazines. While men were early tablet adopters compared to women, research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates that by August 2012, women were 3 percentage points more likely to use a tablet than men.
Tablet users ages 25 to 44 overindexed for newspaper consumption, while magazines were popular among a slightly wider age group, those 18 to 44. These are also the age groups, according to Pew, most likely to use a tablet.
It’s interesting to see the data behind the tablet market. Let’s look at the two reasons you should pay attention to this shift in content consumption.
Higher Income, Middled-Aged People Buy New Technology First
We’re talking about important demographics here from a marketing standpoint. Something that always happens with new technology is that the higher income and middle-aged are the first to adopt new technology. It has always happened in the past 100 years every time a new technology comes along.
When microwaves came out it was the well off 40 year old that purchased it first. When the Nintendo gaming system came out it was the 40 year old upper middle class family that purchased the gaming system for their kids first.
Now, tablets have become the purchase for this same demographic and it will probably be that way for a certain period of time. Other demographic groups will eventually make their way into the tablet market, but only when prices come down and everyone can be sure that tablets are a great way to consume content.
Create Content For the People Using the Device, Not for the Device
When you read that you need to create content for the iPad or for the tablet what you really need to focus on is creating content for the people using the tablet. There are probably some 70 year olds that have iPads and want to read their copy of Good Housekeeping on it, but for the most part that is not the person using a tablet.
If your customer is in the demographics of people using a tablet then it makes sense to create content for them. A good example would be Golf Digest. The person that is really into golf is likely in a higher income area and probably middle aged. They likely have an iPad and would want to read the latest issues of the magazine on their tablet.
That is the strategy for tablets and it’s important to understand who is using the tablet and then target them with content.