Mobile App Development Benefits for Small Businesses & Startups

August 5, 2021

If you are a small business, you are always looking for that competitive edge, and it’s no surprise that it’s a mobile app that can give you a considerable lead in the industry today. Look around, everyone, from Dunkin Donuts to your local coffee shops, has an app. You walk in to buy coffee and the salesperson asks you to download their app to help you save money. Of course, you save, but there’s more… now that company just moves into your pocket, literally. What’s your business? What app do you have? Don’t excuse yourself from these questions just because you are a small business and you think you don’t need an app. In fact, the question you need to ask yourself is this — Why and how will an app make sense for your small business?
Let’s just make an admission in the beginning: an app can work well for most small businesses, but not just about every small business. So who really needs an app? If your answer to the following questions is in the affirmative, then you should consider developing a mobile app for your business.

Q 1: Would you benefit if you had the ability to reach your customers 24/7?

Q2: Can you provide a useful, informative and productive mobile experience around your brand?

Q3: How realistic can your benefits be from a mobile app? By this question, we only meant to tell you that it may be tempting to reach your customers any time of the day or night, but how significantly are you going to benefit from this reach-out?

We’ll now list the benefits of a mobile app if you do decide in favor of building an app for your small business.

Benefits of mobile app marketing versus website marketing
Generally, people have more than a dozen apps on their smartphones. This means that you need to compete with these dozen or so apps for attention from the user. But you need not worry when you consider that in the case of websites, the competition is in the range of one against millions.

Social media versus mobile marketing
Social media is a new medium for a lot of small businesses that are trying to engage with their customers on a round the clock basis using tweets and posts centered on information and services. But when you look at the real face of social media, you will quickly realize that it is not an out and out buy-and-sell platform. Rather, your business is pitted against a lot of users who post more interesting stuff than you. Mobile marketing, on the other hand, helps you make a pointed discussion. You just need to talk about what your customer needs and what best you can offer him.

Email marketing versus mobile marketing
Email marketing is a reliable old guard in the armor of an online business. But then, when you look at the number of loyal subscribers and email open and clickthrough rates, you would realize that the response and engagement rates aren’t as encouraging as you would want them to be. You have to inspire the customer again and again to keep him in good humor. And that’s going to take a lot of your time and energy, other than compelling content. Email marketing is certainly not a losing proposition in the long run, if managed effectively, but it seems tiresome in competition when compared with mobile marketing. After all, mobile marketing has a higher percentage of engagement and inspired action with the push notifications making the users curious about an app. Push notifications don’t just give you updates. They tell you all that’s happening within an app. What’s more, push notifications get read all the time.

Benefits of developing a mobile app
There are three clear benefits that should make you think about developing the right kind of app for your market. These benefits are:

1. Make money: Be it through ads or in-app purchases, smart marketers know how to monetize their app to create a new stream of income.

2. More customers: If your current customers are ready to download your app and stay in for longer engagements, they can even get the word out and bring you more target users who would be associating with your brand for the first time.

3. End to end solutions for the end user: This is an opportunity for you to showcase all your products and services along with all the seasonal offerings to get your customers in the right mood to make transactions. In the app market, only creative thinking and smart planning can help you overcome competition. Make the right choices to develop your ideas for an app, arrive at a reasonable budget, choose the best (app) designer and developer and get ahead in the game of marketing.

Need an app? Get in touch with HubSpire!
If you have finally made up your mind to build an app for your small business but don’t know where to start, give us a call. We’ll make you understand everything you need to know about the app design and building processes, the ideal budget required for developing an app, and the time span it’s going to take to get you to a wider audience.