How to Accelerate Business Growth Using Mobile Technology

Mobile is the new value proposition separator between businesses that want new growth, and businesses that deliver new growth. Mobile is touching every facet of our lives, from the time we get up in the morning to peruse the latest headlines, to reading our current must-read novel by the fireplace after dinner. Mobile is here – its progress is undeniable and businesses who want to gain the competitive advantage are turning to mobile to streamline growth.

Here are three ways to drive business growth with mobile, in no particular order. There are many other good reasons, but these are the ones we see time and again.

1) Mobile provides one major benefit that mobile responsive can’t touch…push technology. With a mobile app tied to your business, you can push messages directly to a customer’s phone. As an example, my young daughter loves her mobile Barbie games, but it drives daddy crazy when I hear her little digital kittens, at 3:00 am, asking to be fed (which translated means insert your credit card and buy some digital cat food). Irritating as it is, it sure makes you pick-up the phone and act – and that’s the point. With mobile, when you have key information you want your mobile audience to hear, you can push notifications to their smart devices like no other medium, allowing your customers or employees to act directly from their smart device.

2) For logistics, banking, insurance, real estate, medical, hospitality and B2b companies, nothing gives you and your company more power than being able to work in the field. Whether it’s a sales representative taking orders, a driver using a smart device to drive to the next drop-off or pick-up location or a real estate agent showing a potential buyer the next property on a house tour, mobile provides incredibly fast access to information. Even the generation X crowd have become the fastest growing adopters of the technology. By developing a mobile app for your business, or mobile apps, both iOS and Android, you are opening an entirely new world of opportunities. Today, companies are developing mobile apps not only to open new avenues for company sales and growth but also to recruit recent grads looking who want to work for “smart” companies or existing company employees who want, and even demand, the ability to work off-site, whether in their car, from home or in the air.

3) Another reason to develop a mobile app is to improve the customer experience. Today, there are many templated platforms that facilitate developing websites that are out-of-the-box mobile friendly. Page elements dynamically float and arrange themselves to fit nicely onto nearly every type of screen in the marketplace, whether on a phone, tablet, computer, even your smart TV, but that’s still not enough. Often, responsive websites still don’t work as well as you would like from a smart device, and depending on your audience, you can end up losing customers, the opposite of original goal. When “mobile-friendly” isn’t enough, mobile apps become the must-have a solution. The other question you and your development partner must answer is the proverbial “do we build only for the iOS (Apple platform) or Android platform, or do we develop for both” question. Since both platforms are developed on different source platforms, costs often make this a difficult decision. We’re not going to debate which is better. That’s for another time and place. What’s important here is knowing the question is going to come up.

Recent statistics say it all. The old days of everyone thumbing their Blackberry’s (we called them hackberries) is gone. Remember the Palm III? According to Statista, a statistics portal in New York City, there were 109MM subscribers to mobile services in the United States in 2000. In 2016, that number skyrocketed to over 400MM. That’s a 366% jump in 15 years, and the appetite for mobile isn’t slowing down. It’s estimated that a new mobile app comes into the marketplace every 12 minutes. That’s right, 12 minutes. And that’s 2016 figures.

To learn more how WebStar can help you deliver mobile technology to grow and improve your business, give us a call. Whether you are an army of one, or you have hundreds of employees, we’ll give you straight answers to your questions, and we’ll provide you with the information you need to make an informed decision about whether mobile is the right strategy for your growing enterprise.