Creating an app for your business is a massive undertaking yet can reap massive benefits. They open a multitude of opportunities for your business and marketing strategies. At the same time, a good app can be costly and not worth it for your business. It is on you to make the ultimate decision, but the following considerations may help you out.
Pros
The App Is Yours
The app itself is reflective of your brand. With the ability to fully customize every inch of your app, you can make every part of it unique to your brand down to the smallest detail. This, more than anything else, is the best way to make your brand stand out from your competitors in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
By creating the app, you have created a link with your customer base that serves as a direct marketing channel for you to use. Every other form of marketing has a small chance of reaching more than your ideal customer and therefore wasting some of your marketing dollars. With the app, it is yours to do with as you wish.
Unique Ways of Marketing
Creating an app opens up several ways for you to expand your marketing in a unique way. You can use GPS or location services (should your customers opt into it) to push a notification of a sale to a specific area. You could also use it to notify customers within a certain distance of your storefront of the specials of the day.
You could use the camera functionality in any number of ways. The limit truly is your imagination (and the capability of your developers). There are so many ways to innovate within this space to make your app and your marketing strategies as unique as they can be.
Marketing via your app also gives you access to more immediate results than other marketing strategies may allow. The immediacy of this information gives you and your marketing team insights much quicker than you would get with traditional marketing tactics, allowing you to pivot your marketing strategies for better results.
A Direct Connection to Your Customers
This direct connection to your customers can be leveraged in a variety of ways. Push notifications can be used to notify customers of new items, restocks, sales, events, or anything else that you can think of as it relates to your business. Depending on your industry, you can implement a loyalty program via the app to turn your occasional customers into more repeat customers.
Additionally, apps provide you with an easy way to provide customer service to your customers. This direct connection that you have with your customers allows them to notify you of problems quickly and for you to fix them just as quickly. This is great for both customer retention and for keeping your business running smoothly.
Additional Source of Revenue
One thing that people often overlook when it comes to creating an app is how it opens up an additional revenue stream for your business. The customer loyalty that apps tend to foster leads to more revenue alongside any app-only exclusive offerings you decide to offer. You could even sell advertising spots on your app if you wanted to.
Cons
Manpower
If you’re just starting to look into creating an app for your business, odds are that you don’t currently have employees with the necessary skills to develop this app. That’s okay, but that’s something you need to consider. While there are some “free no effort” app development programs, most still have a learning curve (and the resulting app may not be all that good).
First you need to decide whether you want to hire an internal team or outsource the development to a separate company. Both options have their pros and cons and only you will know which is the best fit for your business (and your budget). Make sure to do your research. A bad developer is worse than no developer at all.
Time
Development takes time. Creating an app from scratch, whether you hire your own developers or outsource the development process, is a hard process that takes time even if there are no issues throughout. If your development team encounters bugs along the way, the process gets even longer.
This is not meant to say that you should do whatever you can to speed up the process of creating your app. Taking the time to develop the app properly with no (or minimal) issues will lead to a better launch and experience for your customers. But, understanding that apps cannot be created overnight is important before starting this process.
Cost
Creating an app is expensive and maintaining that app even more so. This is arguably the most important thing to know before starting this process. Skimping on the budget you allocate for your app will most likely lead to your app not looking as good as it could and poorly performing as well (then you’ll really lose money).
Before starting, make sure you do a proper profit-loss analysis for this endeavor and make sure that your business can afford it at this time. Don’t forget to include the additional sources of revenue that you can get from having the app!
Creating an app is a massive task, but in many cases, the pros outweigh the cons for your business. A final thing to consider is if your business can truly leverage the app in the multitude of ways that an app can be leveraged. Some industries lend themselves well to businesses having an app while for others it may be a waste of time and money. Make sure you know what you need and good luck!
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