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Posts tagged business mobile apps
How Attorneys Can Use Mobile Apps to Increase Business Development and Serve Clients Better
Feb 13th
So you’ve got a full plate of negotiating, arguing, and pleading to do (and that’s before you leave the house). When are you supposed to find time to deal with practice development, let alone mobile apps?
Well, unless you want to cede the mobile space to the competition, it’s important to spend a bit of time getting a mobile app up and running. And we have some good news: it’s incredibly easy and cost-effective to do! You only need a minutes (okay, maybe a few minutes), and you can have your app designed and ready for approval on both the iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) platforms.
Why bother? Glad you asked:
Mobile apps help you connect with clients (and earn new ones!)
• Push notifications and promotion. With push notifications, you can send alerts to clients about new developments or simply promote your services. For example, if you’re a wills, trusts, and estates practitioner, you can send a message to your app users when new case law may require an update to clients’ planning documents.
• Referrals. Your app can feature a social sharing function that lets current clients spread the word to their network about the great experience they had when working with you, which can lead to new business.
• Reference and tips. If you like, you can use your app to offer simple tips for clients to browse – things like a) 10 Simple Rules for Interacting with the Police, or b) The Critical Steps to Starting Your Own Business. This helps you differentiate from other practitioners and offer additional assistance to clients in an easy and simple way.
• Calls and visits. They’re simple features, but the one-touch dialing and GPS direction functions of a mobile app can help your clients reach you easily. (For some attorneys, you may not want your clients to be able to get you that easily, but fear not – apps made with Bizness Apps are fully customizable!)
• Mobile reservations. For the truly bold, you can open up a part of your schedule and allow clients to set their own appointments using your app. It’s incredibly convenient for them, and will sync with your own calendar. For attorneys that can provide this level of access to clients, you’ll likely wind up increasing client satisfaction and referrals significantly.
This is just a sampling of the ways that mobile apps can boost your practice and help you improve your client relationships. If you want to learn more about how easy setting up an app can be, head here before your next irate call drags you away from practice development.
Honestly, Does My Business Need a Mobile App?
Feb 7th
Many small business owners wonder if a mobile app is really necessary, or if app companies like us are just part of some big global conspiracy to bring pointless mobile apps to the world. As usual, we’re here to offer information and share the reasons that some small businesses (and business leaders) consider a mobile app to be a necessity.
To switch things up a bit, here are a few of our opinions in their shortest, sweetest forms:
Will your business collapse if you don’t have a mobile app out by the end of the day?
No.
Could your business benefit from having an app?
Probably.
Would the benefits be worth the cost?
It’s highly likely.
Will your business be giving ground to the competition if you never release a mobile app at any point?
Definitely.
Okay. So you know where we stand. No surprises there. Lets get into things in more detail.
The current marketing channels
For many small businesses, their marketing plan looks like this:
• Send out mailers locally; purchase ads in local circulars
• Participate in social media, and do a few email campaign
• Rely on Google searches, word-of-mouth, and foot traffic to do the rest
Between these things, many small businesses make a living. But many also wish they could increase sales! And for some, it’s a matter of life and death. After all, as a small business, there isn’t a lot of room to take losses and keep on chugging. (Only those in charge of big companies get to throw away millions and still score huge bonuses each year.) For smaller businesses, its sink or swim, and every little bit counts.
That’s where apps come in.
Are Small Business Apps Necessary?
As we said, failure to create an app won’t destroy your business. Apps aren’t at that point yet. But websites provide a good analogy.
For a lot of businesses, a website was once an exotic item to have. The phone book was all anyone needed, and no one really wanted the hassle of a website. But as they became easier to create with ready-made site building programs, everyone got one. Now, no sane business owner would start a business without a website. They’re too valuable a tool for connecting with customers.
With easy app builders like ours now out, apps are headed in the same direction.
Mobile activity is poised to overtake desktop/laptop activity in the very near future, so mobile is at something of a tipping point. If all consumers will be on mobile most of the time, small business owners generally want to be there with them. And the more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that your competition will hop on the app bandwagon. But even with all this pressure, we don’t think this is the main reason that small businesses need to turn their attention to apps. Our reason is simple:
Apps have an amazing cost/benefit ratio!
The Mobile App Advantage
With Bizness Apps, in about 15 minutes, you can create an app for your business – and for a low monthly subscription fee, you’re all set. From there, the sky’s the limit. You can book sales with it, setup customer loyalty programs, promote special offers, gain social referrals, and much more. You don’t have to do any programming or know anything technical – it’s all built-in. For many businesses, the monthly fee is easily covered by the extra revenue generated by the app.
That is, apps pay for themselves.
When you boil it all down, that’s really all that matters to us – apps provide a new way to connect with customers and boost revenue. For us, that’s reason enough.
So, is an app a necessity? No. Not yet. But something doesn’t have to be a necessity in order to help your business. It just has to make sense.
Mobile Apps & The 2013 Christmas Season
Jan 7th
As Flurry reported last year, the amount of device activations skyrockets on Christmas day (for obvious reasons). Naturally, along with it comes a massive deluge of downloads. In 2012, the total was well over 300 million.
Total downloads numbers were up by a huge margin for 2013.
In addition, Christmas day device activations tend to favor tablets. While the ordinary split is about 80% smartphones, 20% tablets, on Christmas Day, the split is about 50/50.
So, what does all this mean for small business apps, now that Christmas is over?
Well, first of all, we want to congratulate those small businesses that got their apps out before year-end – we’re guessing you saw a nice bump in downloads over the holiday. For the rest, the message is pretty clear – get your app up and running so that you can enjoy the coming holiday boosts of 2014!
The boosts aren’t confined just to Christmas either.
It stands to reason that any holiday which leaves users free to fiddle with their devices will be a good day for small businesses that have an app out. This means that holidays are a great time for app promotion, as well. A simple standee inside your location with a “Download our app, get a 10% off coupon” offer will do well on the holidays when everyone has a hot new device in hand.
The other lesson from the massive holiday download volumes is that apps are insanely popular. With each Christmas bringing a record-breaking number of downloads and new users to the world of apps, it’s hard to argue that apps won’t be an important part of any business’s 2014 marketing strategy. There’s a mobile device in almost every hand now, and a mobile screen in front of every face.
Another interesting fact is the peak of mobile shopping occurs on Christmas Eve itself! xAd, a global mobile-location ad platform recently issued some amazing data about Christmas shopping:
That’s right! Christmas Eve sees 24% more mobile shopper traffic than Black Friday itself.
Some have opined that the peak is due to customers trying to figure out which places are still open. That is, last-minute shoppers are heading home after work on Christmas Eve, or are finally getting in gear, and their mad dash begins the way so many things do nowadays – with a mobile search. Rather than wasting precious seconds driving to Best Buy, or to the local beauty boutique, or to the jewelry store, only to find that it’s not open, customers need to know the $64,000 question:
“What time do you guys close tonight?”
Honestly, it would be very smart to have your mobile website display your hours front and center on Christmas Eve. It would free up your employees to, you know, actually help customers during the maddest of the mad rushes. Not a bad strategy, eh? Also, if your store tends to experience near-riot conditions on Christmas Eve, it would be really nice if the phones weren’t ringing off the hook with people asking for simple information, right?
Anyhow, folks in the mobile world are calling it “Mobile Eve” (the people who don’t like “X-mas,” are really going to love that). About three days prior to Christmas, mobile activity levels reach Black Friday levels. Then, they continue to rise to a fever pitch until they hit their peak on Christmas Eve.
For small businesses and large businesses alike, the advice from Monica Ho, VP of marketing at xAd is to, “[T]ake advantage of this opportunity to reach retail procrastinators and drive them in-store.”
Sounds like they won’t need much of a push, in our opinion, but knowing what they’re after will help a lot. You can, as we said, post your hours at the top of your mobile website. But you can also put last-minute offers there as well. (Ones that cater to desperate shoppers that have no time to think through a gift will probably perform especially well.) You can also put very brief directions to your store there, too, to help people get there before the doors shut.
In short, give mobile users what they want on Christmas Eve, and you’ll have what you want on Christmas Day. Keep that in mind next year, and you’ll do just fine!
Our question is, shouldn’t your business app be there, too? We can help!
