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Posts tagged mobile for smbs
4 Ways to Make Mobile Apps Work for Your Small Business
May 16th
You may have heard recently about the increasing importance of mobile tech strategies for small businesses. Tremendous opportunities are indeed available, but knowing how to take advantage of them is another matter entirely. Indeed, few small business owners are familiar with mobile app development, deployment, and management, or the benefits thereof.
You have enough to worry about without becoming an IT specialist as well, right?
No worries – we have some easily digestible information that we think you will find extremely helpful!
For starters, to learn more about why you can’t afford to ignore mobile, you can check out our post here. If you’re already on the mobile bandwagon, however, and you’d like to learn a few key mobile strategies, please read on.
1. Support existing functions
Mobile apps don’t live in a separate world, isolated from reality. They’re closely interwoven into people’s daily lives, at this point.
When sitting at your desk, a calendar app will ring out a reminder from your pocket about your next meeting. You might then pull out your phone and order up car service on the way down stairs. When you hop in the car, a GPS app will tell the driver how to get to the destination.
Et cetera, et cetera.
When designing a mobile app for your business, think about functions that your business already does, and brainstorm ways for apps to improve them. If you’re a dry cleaner, your app could notify customers when an order is ready for pickup. If you’re a real estate broker, your app could work with existing software to tell clients more about houses they’re visiting by accessing their device’s location data. And so on.
The solutions are truly endless. Be creative, and use your app to enhance your business’s existing functions, and it will provide value right out of the gate.
2. Focus on mobile app tasks
People don’t typically download small business mobile apps to screw around – they’ve got awesome games for that. They generally have a specific task in mind if they’re going to fire up a small business’s mobile app. Play to these tasks, whether it’s looking up contact or location info, making a purchase, submitting a request for a quote, or something else. The key is knowing what customers and prospects want to do with an app from your company, and then to build around that so that core tasks can be executed quickly and smoothly.
3. Don’t settle
It may sound like a pain, but after you roll out your app, it’s important to review user data and feedback, and to continually tweak your app to improve it. Not only will the user experience get better, but you’ll also gain familiarity with data that can provide striking insights into what your users and customers want.
Apps are an excellent source of information – don’t discard it!
4. Do what mobile does best
A mobile device should not be thought of as a portable desktop. It has special features and functions that should be used and taken advantage of, such as the accelerometer (which detects movements), the GPS function, and personalized user data, if you have access to it. Look for ways to take advantage of these functions, and always remember that you can ping a mobile user no matter where they are. Many businesses now will alert customers to a special offer when they walk past the location, for example.
They didn’t develop all those bells and whistles for nothing – use ‘em!
The mobile game is still in an early stage, but time is passing quickly. Follow these tips and experiment to find what works best for your business, and you’ll likely be ahead of the competition in an area that is becoming more important with each passing day.
Small Business Owners Confirm: “Mobile Marketing Works!”
Apr 30th
How do we know? Well, Web.com asked small business owners (about 500 of them), and learned that 84% of those that have stand-alone mobile websites are getting new business from them. This means that prospects and leads are waiting to be found on mobile devices, and that small business that meet them there are getting positive results.
A few related notes:
• 69%: The number of small business owners who think that mobile marketing is key to their growth in the next five years.
• 64%: The number who intend to spend more on mobile marketing this year, when compared to last year.
Given this information, it’s safe to say that small businesses are enjoying returns from their investments in mobile websites and mobile marketing. The main motivations for pursing these avenues are to 1) deliver better service to customers, 2) gain new customers, and 3) build an edge over the competition. But despite these worthwhile benefits, only about a quarter of small businesses have mobile-friendly websites. In addition, most don’t have a mobile strategy, and are currently missing out on opportunities to be found by mobile searchers.
Meanwhile, mobile search volumes are exploding. Mobile search is quickly pushing past desktop/laptop searching, and customers are increasingly expecting businesses to have functional mobile websites. Indeed, a customer’s experience during mobile search can have a powerful impact on a business. In another post, we laid out the unintended negative consequences of having a poor or nonexistent mobile presence, as well as the positive effects of a well-designed mobile presence.
The results might surprise you.
At this point, small businesses must be aware of these issues, or they’ll pay a heavy “tax” imposed by the market and shifting user expectations. With other small businesses confirming that mobile marketing gets positive results, and helps them push ahead of the competitors, isn’t it time you gave it a shot?
For more info, please click here.
