Keeping up with the times is essential if you want your business to achieve long-term success. These days, that means developing a good, easy-to-use mobile app that helps you connect with your customer, and improve their experience of dealing with your company. Let’s consider the main reasons why any business, large or small, should seriously invest in creating a mobile app and what benefits they can by doing so.
Improving Visibility
The fact of the matter is, people are spending more and more time looking at their smartphones, and as a growing business, you should use this to your advantage. A recent study has shown that young people spend around five hours a day on their phones – that’s almost a third of their entire waking hours.
By having an app, you’re ensuring that those that do have it installed on their phones will inevitably look at it multiple times a day. Even if they’re not consciously thinking about using your app, they’ll definitely see it, and anyone that notices your business in any way is a potential customer.
Increased Traffic
Having your app featured in either the App Store or the Google Play Store is another way to increase overall visibility for your brand. These two websites get millions of views every single day, so just having your company’s name up there is a good way to get more exposure.
If you look into app store optimization you’ll find that with the correct keyword placement, you can affect how your app ranks in searches, just like with regular SEO. Eventually, if you do everything right, you’ll be getting more targeted traffic (and even backlinks) from the store back to your website, which will further improve your overall page rank and increase your popularity.
Customer Convenience
One of the most obvious and most significant benefits of having a mobile app is that it helps the customer interact more easily with you and your business. For example, if you’re running a food delivery company, it means a lot to your customer if they can order their meal with a few simple clicks inside an app, instead of having to call your number and explain their order.
Convenience is very important to your client. When choosing between your service and the service of a competitor that doesn’t have an app yet – even if they offer a superior product – practice has shown that most people will still choose you, simply because they don’t have to place a phone call or put in additional effort in any other way.
Feedback and Insights
A mobile app is another channel of communication between you and your clientele, and through it, they can let you know which parts of your service they’re satisfied (or unsatisfied) with. Without proper feedback, you have no idea how you should work to enhance your product (or what kind of product you should develop in the future), so any opportunity to get feedback is an opportunity you should take.
A positive side-effect of this is that you’ll gain valuable insight into the type of customer you should focus your efforts on – your target audience, in other words. You can then work on implementing new features that cater to the needs of your target customer, or improving existing ones if need be.
Standing Out
Even though smartphones have been around for some time now, most businesses still haven’t fully embraced the mobile platform. By being among the first to do so, you can set yourself apart from the crowd, and give your customers one more reason why they should choose you instead of your competition.
Additional Revenue
Building an app can be a direct source of income for your business if you have the right strategy. This is done either by charging for the app itself or introducing in-app purchases. For example, many apps offer both a free version with just the basic features and a Premium version with some extra functionality.
Additionally, even free apps can be monetized through in-app advertisements that generate revenue (the advertiser pays you to display their ads inside your app). Be careful not to go overboard with the ads though, because this really affects the entire user experience and can be quite annoying to your customer.
Summary
Developing an app for your business can have a variety of benefits; they can make it easier for the customer to interact with your services, help you gain insight into your target audience, and even generate extra revenue via the app itself. As mobile technology develops further, there will be more ways an app can help your company. The sooner you start investing in app development, the more your business will be able to benefit from it.
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