Undoubtedly, the entire world has gone mobile and consumers are using their Smartphone’s, IPhone or tablets find local businesses. According to a recent study, “Small businesses are saving more than 800 million employee hours yearly by using mobile apps. Additionally, the survey found that 31% of businesses with 20 – 25 or fewer employees are using mobile apps and eyeing gains in paper reduction, productivity and the ability to meet customer expectations for a more dynamic mobile experience.
Nowadays, mobile devices are becoming a dominating mode of communication and apps are now becoming an indispensable part of how we interact with technology, whether it be personal or business. Creating an app for your business takes a lot of planning and thinking, so we have provided with a list of 10 tips that small businesses must follow to create a leading app.
1. Specify The Purpose Of You App
This is the first step in processing your mobile strategy. Creating a clear view of the business or customer need your app will solve is really very important in motivating mobile users to download it. Take into account your competitors’ mobile apps as well, and try to find out how your app can do better.
2. Find Out Your Target Market / Audience
Defining your target audience or market is the hard part. But, once you know who you are targeting, then it is much easier to understand which type of app you can develop to reach them. So, look for survey results, ask your current customers for feedback. Are they more likely to be iOS or Android users? What type of app could resonate with them? All, these are some very vital factors that will help you come up with a mobile app developing strategy.
3. Keep Your App Simple, But Differentiate
Uniqueness is one of the most crucial ingredients in the process of making your app a commercial success. Keep your app design simple, user-friendly and consistent. Make it better, faster, more powerful or differently distinguished from other apps in the marketplace. Also, it is very important that this difference with added value is clearly understood and appreciated by consumers. However, don’t try to be a solution for every person or to every problem.
4. Take Benefit From What You Have Already
Developing an app using text, visuals, video, content and resources you already use in many other channels lets you to make an app that reflects your brand with the same loaded look and feel of native Android and iPhone apps. For instance, if you are running a restaurant, then you can include your menu, wine list and operating hours, and then you could lure the customer to return to the app simply by including an RSS (Rich Site Summary)feed of the daily specials.
5. Great App Design
Keep in mind that apps with more bells and whistles don’t lure more consumers. During the app development cycle, you need to focus on the end product and be sure that all of your efforts are focused upon the end user and concentrate on how they will react and interact to your app.
The average attention span is about 10 seconds, so your apps need to provide an immediate and obvious value. Based on your knowledge of the business, you should create an outline of what the app should do. To get the best results, you have to find a team of mobile app developers that has a proven track record. Also, ask for samples of how they currently do things.
6. Design An App For Multiple Platforms
You can develop an app for lots of platforms at the same time, instead of spending all your time and money with a single platform before moving to the next one. It will definitely widen your reach to help get your small business in front of more customers through your mobile app. Besides, new advances in HTML5 let businesses to create a native app-like experience in the mobile browser.
Moreover, new frameworks allow app developers to easily take benefits of HTML5 and CSS3 web standards, and enabling web apps to look and feel like native ones. Also, as they are web applications, so they can be easily distributed via QR codes, text messages or social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. According to global technology company Pitney Bowes’ 2nd annual Global Online Shopping Study, “As many as 27% of the people surveyed in India said they would consider purchasing products on social media, followed by Brazil (15%) and Russia (14%)”.
7. Create A Fast App
Your mobile app should load faster than a mobile website. So, ensure that the mobile app development company you hired keeps the app’s download time to no more than 5 seconds.
8. Test Your App
You must test the app thoroughly in order to prevent bugs from getting to the end user. Bear in mind that if app users face problems or issues, then your company’s brand name will take a decline.
9. Price
A key actor in your app success is the price of an app. While a free app always sounds better to mobile users, but it won’t be as good for you, particularly as you had to pay for costs such as the Developer’s License for the app development company you dealt with. So, before releasing the app make a great financial decision. The average return on investment (RPI) for a small business app is really dependent upon what their app does. If the cost of developing the app is recovered in 1 or 2 years, then it’s a good investment
10. Carefully Plan Promotion Strategy For Your App
Don’t make assumptions that your app to be appreciated and loved by users just because you believe it’s great. Remember, bringing something genuinely valuable to the table won’t matter finally, if you don’t take the time to bring forth with a promotion strategy. Take into account both your target audience and the kind of industry you are in.