You might be thinking that your business is small to need a mobile app. The price of developing can be expensive. While your business is small is one of the best times to invest in a mobile app.
It doesn’t have to be fancy to greatly add to the way that your clients or customers interact with your business. Here are eight reasons that show why your business needs a mobile app:
1. Accessibility of Services to Users
For people to use your business, it has to be accessible. Making your business as accessible as possible is important. That is especially true if your business doesn’t have a store-front or office.
Having a good website is a great first-step to increasing your accessibility. That is especially true if it is a mobile-compatible website.
Mobile apps give a feeling of accessibility to your customers and clients that just doesn’t come from a website.
2. New Services For Current Customers
Customers like a dynamic business. Your business may be small. You don’t want it to be stagnant, however.
Developing a mobile app is a great way to expand services to existing customers. This is important in a number of ways. It shows your business is improving and makes it more useful to customers. Finally, it keeps your business on their minds.
3. Lead Generation
A mobile app also increases the visibility of your business. Your app should be available on Android’s App Store and/or iTunes. This will put your business in front of people that you may not be reached through other methods of marketing and advertising.
4. Positioning Your Business As A Leader In The Industry
These days, businesses can’t afford to ignore mobile users. A business that does ignore mobile users doesn’t appear to be on the same tier as businesses that provide mobile apps to their clients and customers.
In this way, having a mobile app lends a certain degree of credibility to your business. Kind of like having a phone in the 1930s, or a website in the 1990s.
If your small business doesn’t offer a mobile app and your competitor does, it’s safe to say that your competitor is winning. Having a mobile app allows you to compete more fairly or to get a leg up.
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5. Receiving Customer Feedback
A mobile app isn’t only superficial and it not only benefits your customers and clients, but it also provides one more avenue for feedback. This gives more value to your clients.
It also allows you to use their feedback faster and more effectively to improve your services. Understanding how people react to your mobile app and services is also education in terms of how people feel about your other services. More on that later, though.
6. Improve Client Interactions
As mentioned above, a mobile app allows you to stay in the minds of your clients and customers. That means that having a mobile app is a great way to increase their use of your service. If your services are easier to use, people will use them more often even if they are already regular users of your services.
This, in turn, gives you a greater understanding of how people are using your services. This is often more valuable than direct feedback. It is also more inclusive.
Insights into how and why they use your services give a wealth of raw data. This can often be used to track trends that you hadn’t previously thought of.
7. Revenue Generation
Apps can also raise revenue for your business. Hopefully, this will at least offset the cost of the app. Best-case scenario, it will raise some extra funds as well.
Apps can make money in two main ways. These are worth considering, but they raise the risk of distracting from the intended use of the app. Ads can also distract from your business.
Apps can make money in another way, a way in which websites can’t. If you charge for the app, the revenue from selling your app to users can be considerable.
It would be nice to let people use your app for free. Charging for the app might be the only way to recoup the cost of making it. That is, unless you are confident enough in the ability of your app to pay for itself using the other means discussed.
8. More Traffic To Your Website
Finally, mobile apps are a great way to increase traffic to your existing website.
Mobile apps draw attention and they take interactions online. If your mobile app offers a form of interaction that you don’t otherwise have, this can be a significant way to increase traffic to your website.
Increasing traffic to your website is its own benefit though it can accomplish more. This is the case if you charge for your app and the app increases traffic to your website.
In this way you make the revenue from sales of the app as well as any revenue that you make from online traffic. This requires some creativity. You want your mobile app to add to or complement your website, not replace it.
Hopefully, this article has to lead you to think a little more about having an app made for your small business. A well-designed and implemented app, however, will allow you to reach more users, to serve your current users more effectively, and to make some money doing it.
