Category Archives: mobile application development

Start With Your Customers for Powerful Mobile Application Development

The mobile application market’s growth has been tremendous over the past several years and it is only expected to keep right on growing.

While this is good news for businesses that have embraced mobile, other businesses run the risk of slipping even further behind the curve. The fact of the matter is that not all apps are equal.

Developing a mobile strategy is essential to succeeding in the modern application landscape | Photo: Jorge Quinteros (Flikr)

Some businesses have worked out a winning formula, while others are trying to figure out the right strategy, others are simply tossing darts into the dark and others haven’t acted at all. Regardless of where your business sits on that spectrum, it is clear that developing a mobile strategy is essential to succeeding in the modern application landscape.

Consumer’s expectations are changing as they are more fully integrating mobile applications into their lifestyle and businesses need to be able to understand consumer behavior to fulfill their expectations. It is important to develop a strategy before you start your mobile application development, a key ingredient to this is understanding your customers.

Consumers have become proficient with applications and expect apps that not only fulfill a need but that allow them to do so rapidly. Great user experiences are essential, otherwise users become frustrated and delete applications.

To avoid being one of the apps that is used once and deleted you must first start but understanding your customer’s expectations. Beyond that you must also understand the mobile medium and blend together a user experience that addresses the consumer’s needs with a tool that leverages that power of mobile.

Businesses that are not working towards this run the risk of being left behind as apps are becoming increasingly more important to business and are flirting with taking over first screen status. According to Gartner, “by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion and making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe.”

Many businesses site down and develop and agenda of what they want their mobile application to do without ever stopping to consider the customer. If your mobile application does not address the needs of your consumers, it won’t spark their interest and will most likely be deleted quickly.

Key to this is engagement. For years we heard this word with social media and its just as important or maybe more so with mobile applications. Part of this is providing relevant information. Mobile is wonderful in its ability to allow you to personalize messaging and to make it as relevant as possible. Working with a user experience designer can help you provide an intuitive interface that helps increase adoption and loyalty. UI | UX design is more important than ever and crucial to mobile application success.

Try to keep an eye on the future too. If you release an app that was dated before it even made it to the app store you are not doing your business any favors. Consumers are tech savvy and up on the latest trends.

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Improve Your Customers’ Shopping Experiences with Mobile Applications

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Technology has transformed marketing. Yet, in a world of what seems to be boundless possibilities it is important to to remember that technology is a tool and that it must be used to improve the customer experience if it is going to be useful.

In other words, if you are just using technology for the sake of using technology with no real plan how to improve the customer experience, you run the risk of turning away customers.

Your approach should keep the consumer in mind | Photo: Vincent Lee (Flikr)

In the mobile age, it is more important than ever to take an approach that starts with the consumer. What are your customers’ needs? Work towards addressing those needs with your iPhone application development or Android application development project.

Don’t get so caught up in what you want to accomplish that your app fails to resonate with users, the app stores are full of apps that are rarely used that were created to drive corporate agendas.

Popular applications that engage users understand consumer behavior and fulfill the needs consumers have.

Be customer centric

Make sure you build your application to improve your customers’ shopping experiences, a key component of this is personalization. One of the greatest opportunities with mobile devices is personalization. Consumers are generally more willing than you may expect to give you access to some personal information if it is used to improve their user experience. In fact, these days consumers basically expect that your are tailoring the experience and messaging to them and their preferences. Apps should offer unique personal value, recommendations and in general, improve service to consumers.

Improve the in-store experience

Physical stores have had a similar feel for years, but now you can improve your customers’ in-store experience with mobile. Consumers now expect to be able to find answers instantly and on the showroom floor is no exception. Analyze the in-store experience you offer can compare it to what mobile savvy customers expect to find areas you can improve in-store shopping. Modern consumers use mobile to read reviews, compare prices, check availability and more. Mobile is the perfect medium to deliver personalized content to consumers at just the right time in the right location.

Have a coordinated program

Evaluate how your in-store program relates to you web site and mobile apps and how they all fix together. Remember that the path to purchase has changed and that consumers now follow a path that could be both online and offline. A coordinated effort is needed to makes sure consumers have seamless experiences. Consumers may start shopping on your app or in your store and complete the transaction later. Make sure that you have the systems in place to allow consumers to do this as this is how people shop now.

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5 Tips to Capturing the Interest of Your Mobile App Users

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The past few years have been an exciting time for businesses and marketers with opportunities abound due to the explosive growth of mobile applications.

Mobile apps have created the incredible opportunity for marketing channels, but on the other hand, over the past few years brands have had to accept that consumers have found themselves in the drivers seat. They pick the subject matter they want to view and now have the opportunity to view it anytime or anyplace they want. Brands must understand this and create mobile offerings with this in mind.

Mobile apps have created the incredible opportunity | Photo: Nichole Kasper (Flikr)

It is worth the effort – mobile is now more popular than TV for consuming content. In the US, we now average over 3 hours per day on our mobile devices.

How does your brand make sure it captures the interest of your potential users?

Think Like A Customer

Approach your mobile application development from the perspective of a consumer. All too often brands create a list of what they want to accomplish with a mobile app and never once stop to consider how their customers interact with their brand and what customers would want from their mobile app.

Look At The Data

Data collection has never been easier to do. With data you can not only understand your customers better, but also be able to communicate with them on their mobile device in a way that interests them. Modern customers have come to expect brands to understand their preferences and deliver information that it pertinent.

Personalization

Delivering personalized and relevant content to your users is the best way to increase and retain users. Brands that personalize content have seen not only an increase in user retention but also an increase in the duration of in-app session. Data can be used to improve user experiences.

Location

Mobile marketing is about more than engaging with the customer, it’s also about doing it at the right time and in the right context. Location data is part of what makes mobile marketing so powerful. Retail outlets are a easy example to look at to see how to leverage the power of location data. Businesses that can deliver relevant continent about sales or new items when a customer is within 2-5 miles of a retail outlet has seen very impressive results.

Value To The Customer

If your application is not offering value for your customers, it will not get used. If your mobile applications are simply sales and marketing tools that don’t offer value to your customers, you are basically telling customers that you want their money, but are not willing to build a relationship of trust.

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Mobile Marketing To Millennials Doesn’t Have To Be Hard. Read These 3 Tips.

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91 percent of teens ages 13–17 go online using mobile devices | Photo: Omar Jordan Fawahl (Flikr)

If your brand appeals to a younger market you probably already know by now that mobile marketing is crucial.

The numbers are somewhat staggering. According to Pew Research Center an astounding 91% of teens ages 13–17 go online using mobile devices, at least occasionally, while 73% of teens own smart phones. This isn’t occasional activity either, as 92% say they are on the Internet daily, while 23% say they use the Internet ‘almost constantly’.

But businesses need to understand that when marketing to Millennials it takes more than just understanding that they have embraced mobile devices.

When you start your mobile application development make sure you take into account specific tendencies of your audience.

Pew Research Center’s research describes Millennials as wanting to forge a distinctive path, while past generations tried to fit in or ‘be cool’, Millennials like to do things their own way. Being less traditional than previous generations, research has found with Millennials that loyalty is harder to earn as they often question the norm. Often the traditional advertising tactics don’t get through to Millennials.

How then do you market to Millennials?

Go Visual

Teens love visual content and mobile apps that have focused on visual content such as Instagram or Snapchat are a big hit with Millennials.

Be Real

The content you deliver needs to be real. Contrived efforts to impress them may not only fall flat but can backfire in terms of a social media backlash. Millennials respond negatively to things that feel fake.

Think Mobile First

Given the overwhelming importance of mobile to Millennials it is essential that your marketing is mobile-friendly and and that you take a mobile-first approach with content. If you are not preparing for your content to be viewed on a mobile device it might be displaying poorly and turning away perspective customers.

Some exciting examples of a using these principles are provided by Snapchat.

Stories, which is Snapchat’s most popular feature, lets users to string together a collection of photos and videos into a longer-form format that is a mix of user generated and brand generated content. Snapchat has also created Discover which showcases curated material from media publishers, like an interactive news magazine inside Snapchat. Each outlet releases a daily bulletin with a limited amount content that users can view or skip. This makes for an exciting opportunity for advertisers that might change the way many approach mobile advertising. Discover is built to showcase a blend of content, including images, video and what they call gorgeous ads.

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How to Improve the Performance of your Mobile Application Program

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Mobile is more important than ever. In fact, smartphones now make up an incredible 75 percent of the mobile market (comScore), which is up from 65 percent of the market only a year ago.

Mobile has taken over and become the primary way that users engage with and access digital media.

While many businesses and entrepreneurs have experienced success with mobile applications and mobile web site, there are opportunities for many businesses to improve the results of their mobile program.

Whether you are using a mobile web site, iPhone application, Android application or all three, these four tips can help you improve the results of you mobile program. Look them over and discuss them with your mobile application developer to improve your mobile program.

Understand How A Customer Interacts with Brands

There are several opportunities for businesses to improve the results of their mobile program | Photo: tyrande101 (Flikr)

In 2015, smart phone users (practically everyone), will find themselves regularly bouncing from one device to another across the course of the day. From laptop to smartphone to tablet and back and forth, a customer may interact with your brand in several ways before making a purchase. From doing research at home or while in the office to showrooming, you need to anticipate customers interacting with your brand in a multitude of ways.

Businesses must understand this a present a clear and unified path to purchase regardless of the medium consumers choose to use to interact with your brand, You should anticipate customers starting searching on one device and continuing doing research on another and possibly making their purchase by another medium all together.

What Do Your Customers Want?

Often when mobile apps don’t catch on like brands want it is due to them failing to consider their consumer and their wants and behavior. You need to analyze what customers would want from mobile offerings from your brand and give it to them. Far too many brands fail to understand what consumers are looking for from them and create apps that offer little or none of the features that consumers are looking for.

Include a Call to Action

When it comes to mobile media many have forgotten marketing basics like including a call to action. Mobile is a new medium where new rules apply but that doesn’t meant that proven principles should be thrown out the window.

Don’t Plan Your Mobile Program In A Vacuum

Don’t have only one group in your organization responsible for your mobile application, marketing or IT won’t see the whole picture and be able to create the proper digital experience. Today mobile is how we do business and brands must include input from all parts of the organization to create apps that perform.

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