What is Adaptive Content?

Updated March 4, 2025

Responsive Meets All Channels

We’ve written about the importance of responsive design as a top trend. Now there’s a new content marketing term that brings it all together. Read on to learn about adaptive content and the omnichannel experience.

Omni-Channel Chatter

At the core of the adaptive content, the concept is that you should be “omnichannel.” This refers to how sales interactions occur across multiple devices. Theoretically, a shopping experience should be seamless across screens regardless of their size.

We all know that search is evolving. According to a study by Think With Google, our search behavior is shifting to a multi-screened world.

• 4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. Common information sought: address, business hours, directions, product availability.
• 50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store location within a day. For those who searched via tablet or computer, that percentage is 34.
• 4 out of 5 consumers want local ads customized to their city, zip or immediate surroundings.
• 41% of searches on a smartphone occur in a store.

What is Adaptive Content?

Since a user is interacting with your brand on many kinds of devices and screen sizes, how they consume your content is obviously affected. Hence the concept of adaptive content. It is a content strategy technique designed to support the sales process across all types of channels.  Here are a few questions to ask when making changes to your content marketing strategy for the omnichannel experience:

1. What’s the business goal? Monitoring how your brand is performing online — via the website (on desktop/laptop, tablet, and smartphone), AdWords campaigns, social media engagement — they should all lead back to your business goals and overall brand performance. While some elements may be difficult to measure, there are many key performance indicators (KPIs) that can tie directly back to market share and sales revenue. Have you connected those dots? If not, that’s the place to start.

2. What content would best support your users? This is where fully-fleshed out personas can help. For example, you can zero in on the types of features, functions, and benefits that support their goals. Imagine these personas with specific needs/goals in mind; now map those journeys out across all types of devices.

3. Can you connect content with business intelligence? Will you know the user’s physical location (e.g., general geographics not IPs), which stage of the buying cycle (info gathering versus interest in a product purchase), or traffic source (e.g., direct URL versus AdWords)? Answers to these questions will help you create content modeling — matching the right content to the right experience.

Be Everywhere

Is creating adaptive content and building an omnichannel experience part of your online marketing vocabulary?