Digitalization, or in simple terms, digital adoption, is the latest business trend that is gaining massive success. The present generation of entrepreneurs is considering technology a promising mode of business growth, due to which most of the startups at the present time are tech-driven.
Digitalization has the potential to create new opportunities and facilitate business growth, which is a reason for its tremendous adoption amongst businesses. This has motivated the technology industry to deliver solutions that are at par with the latest business requirements. One such solution is mobile applications.
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What Is a Mobile Application?
Mobile application is essentially a software developed to perform on mobile devices, as opposed to desktop computers. These applications are fast-performing, functional, efficient, and provide all the benefits of technology on a mobile device. Owing to this factor, mobile applications are gaining popularity amongst businesses as well as their customers.
Today, developing a mobile app for startups is a trend amongst entrepreneurs. These applications aim to increase the efficiency of the business by offering a digital solution to its requirements. Generally speaking, there are two approaches to app development which are native app development and cross-platform app development.
Each of these approaches will impact the time and cost of developing a mobile app and the final outcome. Therefore, it is necessary that you choose the approach that is ideal for your business’s requirements.
Nevertheless, regardless of the approach, you go for, developing a mobile app will have numerous benefits for your startup business. Moving forward, let’s find out how a business can benefit from developing an application.
10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Mobile App
24/7 Business Availability
Mobile applications are installed once and can be used at any time by the users. This aspect of mobile apps facilitates businesses to be available to users 24/7.
This constant availability is beneficial for businesses in terms of revenue and customer satisfaction. To elaborate, customers can connect with the business at any time of the day and fulfill their requirements.
This benefit of mobile applications is especially noteworthy in e-commerce mobile applications, which are known for providing a convenient shopping experience to the users.
Efficient Marketing
Marketing is essential for growing a business and ensuring its long-term profitability. Generally speaking, there are two ways to market a brand: traditional marketing and digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the latest, highly efficient, and reliable way to market a business. These benefits of digital marketing are further enhanced when implemented on technologies like mobile applications.
Having a mobile application will allow your business to reach a wider audience and easily promote your goods and services to them. This, in turn, will benefit your business in the long term and will increase the market trust of your brand.
Better Customer Service
In the present time, customers prefer brands that deliver exceptional quality customer service. It is challenging to fulfill this objective in a traditional business.
However, by having a mobile application for your startup business, you can deliver high-end service to your customers. The latest trend is to integrate a mobile app with technologies like AI and chatbots to increase the quality of customer service.
Therefore, it is safe to say that, by using a mobile application, a business can deliver customer satisfaction, which is a necessary factor for customer loyalty and repetitive revenue.
Online Selling Channel
One of the most noteworthy advantages of developing a mobile app for your business is that you can create a channel for online selling. E-commerce, for example, is taking over traditional businesses and is becoming the leading choice among consumers for shopping. Speaking factually, the global worth of the e-commerce sector is valued at 13 Trillion USD.
Numerous other types of businesses can also benefit from this online selling channel that mobile apps facilitate. This shows that investing in mobile app development can not only increase the efficiency of your business but also open doors for revenue generation.
Efficient Business Management
Manually managing business operations is highly inefficient and impractical in most cases. Many businesses are implementing digital technologies to address this concern and improve their operational efficiency.
Mobile applications facilitate this need of present-day businesses and are a complete solution for efficient business management. Mobile applications, when integrated with technologies like AI and Big Data, are efficient in automatically managing various tasks.
This results in less requirement for human effort and increased operational efficiency of a business. This is especially beneficial for startup businesses where resources are limited, and efficiency is a must to generate profit.
Insightful Customer Analytics
Analytical data on customers is essential for the strategic planning of a business. However, it is challenging for a business to gain access to this analytical data.
A business can overcome this challenge by developing a mobile application. These applications offer insightful and highly detailed analytics that facilitate seamless decision-making.
Using a mobile application, a business can gain access to customers’ information and thoroughly understand consumer behavior, which is the foundation for efficient strategic planning. Moreover, one can also get analytics on their business’s performance such as best selling time of the year, best-selling goods, least selling goods, conversion rate, etc.
Positive Brand Image
A positive brand image is essential for a business to gain market success. This brand image helps in increasing the creditability of the business and eases customers’ decisions to purchase goods.
Having a digital presence, especially with a mobile application, is one of the best ways to achieve this objective. Connecting with a brand digitally generates market trust and helps in achieving a distinctive position.
This is especially beneficial for startup businesses where a newly established business has to compete with already established and well-reputed ones. This makes app development for startups a great business idea in the long run.
Competitive Advantage
In the present time, the competition amongst businesses is intense. One way to overcome this competition is to find factors that give your business a competitive advantage.
One of the best ways to achieve competitive advantage is to develop a mobile application. In the present time, having a mobile application is useful for businesses in numerous aspects and is a popular practice.
However, not many businesses are aware of these benefits. In this case, having a mobile app can certainly turn out to be a competitive advantage for your business.
Seamless Customer Relationship Management
Every business looks forward to having a good relationship with its customers. However, it is challenging to achieve this objective without using digital technology.
Mobile applications are highly useful in this aspect and are known for being extremely user-friendly. A business can use a mobile application to practice efficient CRM strategies that will increase its customer satisfaction rate.
Simply stated, customers can use various user support features of a mobile application such as email, call, in-app chat, chatbots, FAQs, etc to connect with the brand. This is useful in solving customer disputes, resolving customer queries, and offering support.
All these factors collectively contribute to a higher customer satisfaction rate and, in turn, add to customer loyalty. This makes mobile app development a worthy investment for efficient customer relationship management.
Process Automation
As we discussed before, manually conducting processes is highly time and cost intensive and, therefore, is an inefficient practice. This is where the role of technology comes into the scenario.
Mobile applications are highly capable of automating various business processes. This will enable businesses to complete tasks in less time and cost. Moreover, business owners can use this saved time to focus on more important aspects of the business.
Owing to the latest technological advancements, it is now possible to automate various processes using a mobile application. The scope of process automation through mobile apps extends to finance automation, inventory management automation, CRM automation, etc.
This was it for the top 10 reasons why your startup business needs a mobile application. Now you must be wondering, ‘how can I get a mobile app for my business’, right? Well, the process of developing an app is time-consuming and requires high expertise. There are various ways (approaches) through which you can develop a business app. Moving further, let’s take a look at these app development approaches.
How To Get a Mobile App For Your Business?
Different approaches yield different outcomes, and choosing the wrong one can turn out to be disastrous for your app development project. Therefore, it is essential to carefully evaluate each of these approaches before selecting one for your app development project.
Develop an App Yourself
Did you know that you can develop an app all by yourself? Well, at least if you have the technical knowledge of app development. That is, you must know different programming languages, frameworks, development environments, etc.
This approach is also known as DIY development and self-development. While many businesses start with this app development approach, they either abandon the project or take external help in between. This is because it is almost impossible for one person to know everything about app development and successfully develop an app.
Not just that, you can also use app builder tools like Build Fire, Firebase, Zoho Creator, etc. to easily develop a mobile application. All you need to do is drag and drop different elements, and all the programming will take place simultaneously. While developing an app by yourself is a cost-effective approach, you would have realized by now that this option is not likely to generate high-quality output.
Hiring a Development Team
This is one of the most popular approaches to developing a mobile app. Here, a business hires a team of business analysts, UI/UX designers, developers, testers, and project manager to work on the app development project.
Naturally, the cost of developing an app with this approach will be high. The business will have to spend money not only on the salary of the employees but also on administrative charges.
At the end, these expenses will directly add to the cost of app development. Moreover, this approach is ideal only if you are planning to build a large-scale application for your business.
Consequently, this approach is not ideal for startup businesses due to budget constraints. There is always a chance of the application failing in the market, which might result in tremendous business loss.
Outsource App Development
Development outsourcing is considered to be one of the most ideal and highly favored approaches in any digital platform development project. Here, a business takes external help to develop a mobile application.
Generally speaking, there are two approaches to app development outsourcing which are: appointing an agency and hiring freelancer(s). Even though these approaches fall under the common umbrella term of outsourcing development, their concepts and outcomes are poles apart. Here are the key differences between getting an app developed by a freelancer vs. an agency.
You would know by now why it is better to invest in hiring a development agency instead of a freelancer. This approach is highly popular and is ideal for startup businesses. By outsourcing app development to an agency, you can get high-end output in less time and cost and benefit from the expertise of a complete development team.
Buy Readymade Solutions
Readymade solutions, also known as white label solutions, are ready-to-go platforms that are available with most of the development agencies.
These platforms are coded once and are distributed to different businesses upon their demand. The agency changes the color, elements, theme, etc. of the application as per individual client requirements.
This approach is ideal if you are looking for cost-effective solutions for your startup’s mobile application. However, you must know that since the development agencies sell these solutions to numerous of their clients, there are chances that your application’s UI design will be similar to that of your competitor.
This can, in turn, negatively impact the user experience of your target market, therefore hindering the whole objective of developing a business app. Therefore, we recommend you to carefully measure the pros and cons before making a choice to invest in white-label solutions.
Hire Dedicated Developers
This is a hybrid model of hiring a development team and hiring a development agency. To elaborate, if you want to benefit from the expertise and time dedication of full-time developers without incurring the high cost, this is the ideal approach for you.
Currently, numerous development agencies offer the service of ‘hire dedicated developers’. Here, you can directly hire the developers that are working in the development agency for your project. Once hired, the agency appoints these developers to work full-time on your requirements.
What’s more? The developer will directly report to you and will provide frequent updates on your project from time to time. You can also replace the appointed developer with a new one at any time in case you are not satisfied with the output.
All you have to do is send in your requirements to a development agency offering this service. This makes hiring dedicated developers the most optimum alternative for hiring an in-house team.
The Bottom Line
We hope that the blog enabled you to understand the importance of mobile applications in the present business scenario. Developing a mobile application is no longer a trend but a requirement for businesses that plan to sustain in the long run. Today, businesses of all scales and sizes, from startups to enterprises, require a mobile application.
The vast benefits that mobile apps offer to businesses make them a worthy investment with excellent revenue potential. Moreover, by conducting optimum research and choosing the right approach, you are certain to get an optimum app for your business.