Mobile apps are a huge part of today’s society, providing services for all parts of our lives. But while users benefit from the incredible mobile capabilities, apps are also bringing some fantastic opportunities to the businesses who invest in building them. Here are four ways businesses can improve their customer-base using mobile apps.
Social Media Presence
Businesses benefit a lot from having a strong community of active customers, like a shopping mall or a dance club, it’s important for potential customers to know that the business is popular. The customer community is one of the strongest assets a business can have.
But for many businesses there isn’t much opportunity to have a real-life user community. That’s what makes online social media so important; social media allows any business to create a place for followers to congregate, an online page where the company can communicate easily with customers and those customers can communicate easily with one another. Through social media, those followers can even spread your business to their own social circles.
Mobile apps can be designed to integrate closely with your chosen social media platforms, inviting users to participate in your social media, even giving them the ability to post on social media at the touch of a button. These features are incredibly potent in a mobile app due to the popularity and accessibility of mobile devices. By designing an app to integrate with social media, you can give your social media a huge boost towards becoming an effective marketing tool.
Increased Visibility
We’ve all had our fair share of struggles with SEO rankings, and it’s very possible that these days’ people just aren’t finding your website through Google searches. Apps give you another service for potential customers to search for. By listing your app on Google Play and iTunes App Store (try the Windows Store too!) you give millions of users the chance to find your app through searches.
With a nudge from marketing, your app can easily hit trending lists and gather hundreds of thousands of users or in a matter of weeks. A popular app with your name attached will get a ton of traffic and generate interest in your business.
Feedback
Your mobile app gives users some opportunities to give you feedback. Without any added feedback features, users will be able to use app store reviews to send positive and negative messages about your services.
Don’t be too upset about getting negative reviews, they are all but unavoidable. What you can do is turn those negative reviews into a positive image by responding to them with a clear message that you’d like to help them solve their problem. And if you do discover a solvable issue, you can fix it in an update, creating more confidence in your brand.
You can also give users a chance to give feedback within the app. Even without consciously communicating, users will provide valuable information regarding how they use the mobile app and what features they frequently utilize. But you can also give them a chance for a direct contact with you, which can be used to make inquiries, suggestions, critiques, really anything the customer might want to say. This gives you a chance to respond with sales pitches, app updates, app support, and more. This dialogue between you and your customers creates increased trust and brand loyalty.
Mobile Presence
Last, but not least, you have to consider the importance of mobility in our modern society. People are spending more and more time on the move, away from computers, while mobile devices allow them to keep up with their needs, and with devices like Google Glass on the horizon, that trend isn’t reversing any time soon. By creating a mobile app, you are pushing your business forward into the mobile era.
Apps are the key to connecting mobile users to services they need while they are . These services range from silly games to pass the time to major alerts for dangerous weather. Apps help us board the right trains, take our medications on time, and avoid getting lost. They save us time and save us money. Apps matter, and all it takes for your business to benefit from having an app is an idea for how you could help mobile users.
Photo Credit: Flickr/lab604
