Necessity Of Use Makes App Development Cost-Effective
Mobile apps can help foster customer loyalty, facilitate more streamlined scheduling, and even provide for online payment options with greater convenience than ever. But can your small business really afford to deploy such solutions? As a matter of fact, yes. It turns out there are even free design parameters for applications online today.
Granted, this is a new field; but you’ve likely already heard the phrase “there’s an app for that”, haven’t you? Mobile applications have become so penultimate in modernity that they’re lampooned socially. That says more for their prevalence than many statistics can, and should cause savvy small business owners to perk up their ears.
Forbes.com points out that having a mobile application provides the propensity for your brand to be in potential clients’ visibility continuously. If you can be continuously visible in a marketplace which has been overrun with applications, it’s going to be good for your bottom line. If you’re absent in such a market, it may seem suspicious.
If a potential client can download a free application from a plastic bag company, but your real estate firm doesn’t have one, then subconsciously the potential client may wonder as to the effectiveness of your real estate office. Can you see why? Applications are becoming the new “web address” of modernity.
An Analogy To Consider
This may be strange to think about, but telephones used to be an innovative, rare thing. Until the late 1800s, no business had any kind of telephone. As the turn of the century came, they were becoming commonplace but were still something reserved for the rich or influential. By the fifties, everybody had a phone number and a phone book.
Certainly, having a phone number or a phone in your business was a novelty initially, but refraining from having one later on would result in ultimate losses for your company. Likewise, apps were initially something that was a neat bit of confetti, an interesting and festive accouterment. But they are fast becoming integral to operations.
People are lazy, and this has fundamentally been the case throughout human history. If all your competitors retain their bottom line by constantly reminding prospective clients via mobile apps, the clients will be trained in a subconscious Pavlovian way to respond. They’ll be “classically conditioned”. If your business isn’t present in that conditioning, then you won’t be on prospective clients’ radar.
Ensuring Your Apps Are Properly Monitored
So eventually you’ll have to design an app; and by the time that gets out, you’ll likely need a couple. Something to consider, though, is that unlike most advertisements, unlike phone numbers, and unlike business cards, mobile apps exist in a non-static environment. They are in constant flux, and as such require constant monitoring.
Smartphones are upgraded. Technology continuously innovates. Most cell phone companies will give you a free next-gen phone every two years as part of an “upgrade” program. So when you develop an app, just as important as its development is your ensuring said app remains functional, and is upgraded as needed.
Stackify.com can help you monitor application performance; their goal from the beginning has been to assist those facilitating mobile applications: “Stackify was started and [the goal] has always been to improve how developers monitor and troubleshoot application problems.”
Using services like these can help you remain competitive in a marketplace that increasingly demands businesses large and small have some core information technology component informing their services. For those who have yet to consider the possibilities mobile applications bring, taking time for a little research is to be advised.