Those days are long over when advertising was deemed to be the most important channel for marketing your brand. With progress in the digital space, having a strong mobile platform presence has become mandatory for any brand/business to grow and succeed.
In today’s time, mobile apps have become the most effective marketing channel for brands. Having a mobile app not only helps brands to automate their business processes but also helps brands to provide better services to their customers. Apps help brands to establish themselves and to form a deep connection with their target audience no matter the demographic and age group as apps help them to promote brand awareness and to increase their market visibility in the right way.
Targeting each individual customer on the basis of their preferences has become the need of the hour though it is comparatively easier to target a mass audience and mobile apps allow brands to do just that.
Why Brands Should Go Digital?
Today majority of time spent by people online is spent on applications. Most individuals have their smartphones with them wherever they go which implies that with an application you can target your audience almost anytime and anywhere.
Brands are now starting to realize the vast potential of what a mobile application can do for their business and that its use goes much beyond just selling a product or service. This realization has led to the opening up of brand-new marketing avenues. Mobile apps have given businesses the opportunity to interact with their target audience in many new and unique ways to turn them into loyal and permanent customers.
Mobile apps are a very strong marketing channel for companies as it helps them to connect with their audience, convey their brand’s message in a variety of ways, keep their customers engaged and create a customer base in a competitive marketplace.
If you still have any doubts about how powerful mobile apps are as marketing tools here are the top 5 benefits of mobile apps as marketing tools!
Advantages of Mobile Apps In Marketing
- Develop a Connection With Your Customers
For any business maintaining customer engagement is crucial and having a mobile app helps the brand to develop a deeper connection with its customers and even target audience.
With the decline in attention spans of individuals and rise in competition, it is becoming increasingly important to generate useful content which is more personalized to keep your users engaged and make them come back for more.
One very effective method to engage your customers is to consistently offer them unique personalized content. To gain the interest of your target audience the content you put out needs to be relatable and should attract the interest of your audience. In this fast-paced dynamic environment, the preferences of users keep changing, and to establish your position in the market you will have to keep up with these ever-changing trends.
Irrespective of the type of app, a brand should invest in personalized in-app content, and to make sure that happens, brands need to create and study customer personas which will help them to understand better what type of content will work best for their target audience.
Push notifications are another effective way to form a connection with your audience as push notifications have the power to grab user attention and make them want to explore what new is happening in your app. The key aspect of push notifications is to make them personalized and attractive. The push notifications sent by your app should add some value to your users, it can be a copy, a promotion, or an offer.
- Improve Brand Visibility and Awareness
Businesses are always looking for platforms through which they effectively promote and market their brand. Apps can be a useful tool to enhance brand awareness and can efficiently improve their customer base.
If a user installs an application on their smartphone, they will come across the logo of your brand regularly which increases the company’s brand awareness and visibility. The more the user interacts with your brand’s app, the faster they tend to make a purchase.
To get your users buzzing about your brand’s unique app, you must make sure that you include all the idle features in your app that the target audience will be looking for.
The app for your brand should be interactive and more personalized to attract your users to regularly use your app as at the end it all comes down to one thing, the more people engage and get introduced to your app, the more chances are that they will actually make a purchase with you.
- Customer Data Collection
Every good marketing strategy involves analyzing customer behavior. If your app can solve a pain point for the customer, it is highly likely that they will share their data with you.
Mobile Apps can be used as a brand marketing tool to monitor app users, their individual shopping behaviors, engagement rate, browsing habits, demographics, active hours, and many more aspects.
This way your brand can get valuable insights that can be used to analyze the data, understand the needs of the customer, and improve your product quickly.
You can collect user data in many ways like
- While Onboarding you can ask your users to answer a simple questionnaire that will include information about their age, preferences, habits, and more.
- You can offer your customers discounts or bonuses as a reward for completing a small questionnaire.
- Marketers can also track the marketing process by analyzing and monitoring the customer’s in-app behavior. For brands, it becomes easier to collect user data based on their purchases and reviews of products.
In this way, you can easily use the customer data and evaluate it to optimize your marketing strategy based on customer feedback.
- Gaining Customer Loyalty
To gain customer loyalty, you can reward your frequent customers. Gaining customer loyalty has become a very hard task for a majority of brands due to high market dilution. In this scenario, a mobile app is a perfect tool to gain customer loyalty.
By rewarding frequent customers, you encourage them to buy more and they are highly likely to promote your brand in their circle. This strategy can be put to use easily using the push notifications feature or the in-app messaging feature.
Rewarding loyalty helps to establish a tight connection and transforms users into loyal customers.
- Scale Up The Target Audience
The internet today, is not just making things easier but it is making things that would seem impossible decades ago to happen in real-time. Apps will not only help your brand to increase your reach just in your home country but also expand your reach throughout the world. Apps open up a vast range of possibilities for your brand.
Using geo-targeted push notifications, localized brands can send targeted messages to their audience. Location-specific CTAs using location mapping give a more personalized feel to the users, grow their target audience, and help drive more sales for your brand.
5 Mistakes To Avoid When Making a Mobile App For Your Brand
Having a mobile app for your brand has many advantages, you can create a unique app for your brand and get users to download it as well but it does not necessarily imply that the users will return to your app.
A study from Statista shows that 25% of the apps downloaded worldwide are used by users only once after downloading the app. The reason behind this abandoning of apps by brands is either poor UX or if the app focuses on novelty value rather than functionality.
Here are 5 mistakes on the basis of my experience that you should avoid while making an app for your brand and using it as an efficient marketing channel for your business.
- Complicated App
The easiest way to decide if an app is good is to check how convenient it is to use for its customers. If the app is difficult to use irrespective of the functionality it has to offer, it will not be appealing to the majority of the audience.
- Lack Of Special Offers
The main goal behind having an app for your brand should be to increase awareness about your app and to increase customer loyalty. If an app lacks offers, discounts, and other in-app benefits then the users will most likely abandon the app.
- Lack Of Personal Touch
In today’s time, a vast variety of content is available on the internet and with the ever-falling attention spans of individuals, it has become imperative to provide a personal touch to your brand’s app.
You can target every individual on the basis of their unique preferences through your app and generate personalized content for each of your customers. Personalized push notifications can help you increase user retention and also turn them into loyal customers.
- No Value Addition For Users
All apps work to address a pain point and are designed to solve a specific problem. This is true for branded apps as well. If you use your brand’s app just to place ads on your target customer’s smartphones, then you have got it wrong.
A branded app also should address users’ pain points in one way or another. Users will constantly be engaged on your app only if you create a useful product that provides some value on a continuous basis. The best approach to create such an app is to analyze your target audience, understand their needs, and figure out what they expect from your app.
- Lack Of Updates On Your App
It is imperative to keep your app up to date with the latest shifts in technology. If you regularly change your marketing strategy, website design, or improve branding, you should ensure that you have resources to make similar updates on your app as well.
Wrapping Up
A brand’s own mobile app can be considered to be a brand’s own marketing platform. It forms a direct marketing channel for your brand and enables marketers to spread their reach to a wider range of audiences across the globe. If you are still not taking advantage of mobile apps as a brand marketing channel for your business then you are surely running behind. It is the right time to explore this brand-new marketing avenue and leverage its benefits.