For almost any business, one of the core intentions is the attraction of customers’ attention. You can create sophisticated network hardware or bake donuts, but it doesn’t matter how good your goods and services are unless nobody knows what you can offer. The ways of interaction with potential customers have undergone many changes following the evolution of technologies and changes in lifestyle. TV commercials, billboards, and even spamming have become a significant part of our lives. The emergence and widespread mobile devices have led to a new form of interaction between businesses and customers.
Smartphones, tablets, phablets. Almost everyone around owns one or a couple of them. The reason for such popularity is a wide diversity of mobile applications that help you communicate with your relatives, friends, and colleagues, share thoughts, get new information, etc. Since everybody’s attention is already focused on mobile devices, there’s nothing more natural for a business of any kind than the tendency to expand it using mobile apps. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of developing mobile apps for your business.
The Core Benefits of Having a Mobile App
1. Your App is a Constant Reminder of Your Business
One of the main advantages of mobile applications over other ways of interaction with a consumer is the fact that apps are available almost anywhere and anytime. People take their phones everywhere and use them to entertain themselves every free minute. Bus stops, grocery stores, traffic jams… There’s always someone chatting with friends, sharing thoughts or reading news. And it’s a good idea for a business to get into a customer’s pocket via its smartphone and become visible every time a customer turns it on.
2. You Nurture Customer Loyalty
As a result, with an app, you’ll get the ability to know your customer better. You can get feedback from a user and understand what part of your business needs improvement and how you should change it to work better. Users can share the data that can be precious for you to offer better goods and services. Location and demographic information, user’s age, etc. All this data will help you adapt your business to the target audience.
3. You Provide Fast Connection with Users On The Go
The availability is also pretty useful in case you want to implement a support feature. It’s easier to connect to you using a mobile app rather than using call center services. You can also provide a bunch of tutorials and how-to’s that can help your clients solve their problems and avoid any possible dissatisfaction.
4. You Make Most of Social Media
You can also use social media benefits with ease. The intention to communicate with other people is a part of our nature. So, why not make use of it? Features like comments, built-in messengers, and likes may become an additional reason for a user to spend more time with your app. Reviews can give a general understanding of how good your services are. But the possibility to contact a particular reviewer will help with gathering specific information about different aspects of your business. Sharing your app via Facebook, Twitter or any other social network can influence other users to use it.
6. You Increase Your Brand Awareness
We unconsciously record every image and text that we see. That’s why installed application increases your brand awareness. Branding is a significant part of the nowadays business. And a mobile app with a recognizable logo and a catchy slogan line can play in your favor.
6. You Get Closer To Your Customers
One should not forget about the device-specific features that can bring business-customer relationships to a new level of interaction. By using push notifications, you can inform your customer about any offers, discounts, and upcoming events. Use geotagging to get user’s location and customize your offers to make them more attractive.
How to Build Mobile Apps [Useful Links]
If the above arguments have convinced you and you’re planning to create a mobile app for your business, you probably ask yourself the obvious question: “How to develop mobile applications?” There are two main options. You can either rely on your skills or ask for help from an app development company.
If you want to develop a mobile app on your own, but don’t know where to start from, there are some articles you may find helpful:
Mobile Application Development Process From A to Z describes what types of mobile applications exist and what are their main pros and cons. There are also some hints on choosing the programming language and a brief description of how the process of mobile application development looks like. Read more
Another useful article is Hybrid Mobile App Development. It focuses on a particular type of mobile apps that can be described as a mobile website that looks and feels like a native app. There’s no reason to think that you’ll find full and comprehensive guides on creating a mobile app if you follow the links. It is more like an opportunity to classify possible solutions. Read more
Note: An important thing to remember is that besides the obvious advantage of creating a mobile application by yourself, there’s a lot of disadvantages. You’ll save some money that can be used directly for the business needs, but instead, you’ll lose precious time. The loss scale depends on the level of your skills. And if you have zero experience in such work, there is no guarantee that you’ll get satisfactory results.
As it’s been said, the other available option is a web development company. In this case, you can rely on a team of professionals. Such an approach allows you to avoid the distraction and concentrate on your business development strategy.
How We Made a Mobile Business App
Let’s take a look at the real case study of the mobile application developed by XB Software.
Workforce and Facility Management Suite is a web and mobile application for administrating the workflow. Here are the basic features requested by the customer:
- possibility to manage customers, contracts, and orders
- short-term and long-term planning of work-shifts
- possibility to visualize the major KPI
- NFC technology that allows exchanging data between devices, etc.
As a result, our developers created a user-friendly web-based solution that helps build efficient workflow schemas and visualize activities in a simple and good-looking scheduler. The integration of the app increased the company’s overall performance and productivity.
The application was built as a SaaS solution which can guarantee better workforce management and instant accessibility through a browser. PhoneGap was used to provide near-native user experience and enable NFC-tags support. HighCharts was used for KPI graphs visualization. Developers used the Webix framework for building the app itself. Besides the listed technologies PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, JavaScript Scheduler, and Node.js were used.
As you can see, mobile app development involves a wide variety of techniques which means that such a project requires a team of developers of different specialties.
Most Useful Mobile Business Apps To Consider
Are you still in a quandary on what mobile app to develop? Here is a list of the most useful mobile apps in 2015:
- Personal Productivity Apps
- Enterprise Productivity/Internal Collaboration Apps
- Travel/Mapping Apps
- Communication Apps
- Mapping/GPS Apps
- Mobile Payments/Wallet Apps
- Contact Management/Business Social Networks Apps
- News/Entertainment Apps
- Social Media
Conclusions
In the case of communication between the business and the customer, the primary advantage of mobile applications is a special kind of relationship. If you use advertising of any sort, you refer to a group of people. As a result, a person perceives himself as one among the others, a particle of your target group. But if you use a well-designed mobile application along with the properly developed strategy, it may feel like you address him directly. You can add a feedback feature, implying that every single opinion is important to you and use the acquired information for further improvements. You can use geotagging to make an individual offer according to a user’s location. People can use sharing features to share the experience that they had with your brand, expanding the number of potential users. And all the handy features that you have implemented are available 24/7. Either you decide to create a mobile application by yourself or choose a development company, this decision can help improve your growth rate to a great extent.